Incomplete Cathedral

Our rations were dwindling, and so were our resolves. Utu wasn't especially forgiving, either.

Due to its core density, the planet's gravity was greater than that of Digi's, and its atmosphere was thick and toxic. We'd been surviving, those three days in the Utu wilderness, just on liquids siphoned into our suits, and the arduousness of our journey was killing us, slowly. Every step felt heavier than the last. Even the air resisted us, and it looked like the egg drop soup I liked so much from Chou's on Digi: thick, white wisps of something like vapor or smoke were suspended in and clouding the lower atmosphere, and only atomized and dispersed as we broke through them.

I knew we wouldn't make it another three days.

In all it had been twenty-six days, mission-elapsed time, since our systems failure marooned us on this rock. We thought that our backup power stores would hold us over until someone responded to our distress signal, but we were wrong. No one came. Nearly twenty-three days had passed, our backup cells drained beyond use, and our beacon, sending out our unheeded radio transmissions into the void, began to fade.

At first we had thought little of the set back. The Volante was an old ship, and these types of malfunctions, however unwelcome, were bound to happen at some point. When the emergency lights came up on the HUD, it had been my decision to land. Better to be on solid ground than floating around in space with no control, I thought. We touched down roughly on Utu, crashing through a rock ridge as we skidded to a halt, but none of us were injured in the ordeal.

Like I said, at first it was only bothersome; an inconvenience. There were four of us. We made the most of the time spent waiting for our rescue. It was like an unexpected holiday, and we took for granted that we would be found and taken back to Digi for repairs. I remember, Quirk, who usually played the stoic, even made some joke about the hazard pay we'd get from our handlers for this shit. We played spades and rummy. We drank and we smoked. I suspected that Saturday and Johansen were escaping to the engine room on occasion to fool around with each other like teenagers.

But as the days dragged on, we had stopped joking, and we'd stopped taking things so lightly. We had started to wonder whether help was even on its way.

"How long would it take a radio signal to get back to Digi?" Saturday had asked. He was writing things down, trying to calculate exactly when we'd be off Utu.

"Space is a big place," Johansen replied, absently. She was sitting at the controls, leaning back in the cushioned seat with her feet up on the dash. Her long, dark red hair was draped over the back of the chair like limp tentacles.

"Radio waves travel at the speed of light," I offered. "So, with Digi 1.2 million kilometers behind us, I'd guess our message would be received by them within about four seconds of us sending it. The real question is, how long will it take them to get to us?"

Saturday was writing again. "And average velocity of a schooner is what, Cobb? 35,000 kilometers-per-hour?"

"That sounds about right," I confirmed.

He stopped writing suddenly and inspected his work. Then, he looked up at me, perturbed.

"Then what the hell?" he squawked. If anything, Saturday's appearance was birdlike, with his big nose and gangly limbs.

I shrugged. Quirk entered the control room behind Saturday and snatched the paper from him and looked it over. "They're late," he said tersely.

There was no humor in his voice then, and there would be little humor after that.

As the days went on, I noted the changes. The four of us no longer ate from our stores without considering that we might eventually run out. When we played cards, we played silently, just to pass the time. And we no longer bathed, because we knew our water supplies were limited.

And then things got even worse.

The backup systems were prioritized. First to go off was the ambient lighting, replaced by dim, red emergency bulbs scattered throughout the Volante. This happened after the tenth day. Next were the temperature regulators, day fifteen. The ship's shielding and insulation kept us cool for two or three more days, but after that the heat became nearly unbearable.

The third to go was the beacon, and that was when we knew that our time was running out. The next to go off line would be the pressurization and filtration/ventilation systems. With the only other options being death by suffocation or by the space bends, it had become apparent that our suits would be our last chance at surviving all of this.

Utu had once been a mining colony. It was our hope that with the last of our oxygen and liquid sustenance supplies, we would leave the husk of the Volante behind to find the old mining camps, and perhaps there we would discover some caches left behind by the companies that had pulled their workers from the planet. But I knew it was just a pipe-dream. We were only searching for the camps to keep our feet moving, to give us some arbitrary purpose in our last days.

Saturday's whining over our comms was becoming raspy now as we trudged along through the cobalt-blue Utu dust. Quirk told him to save his breath.

The suits were bulky, and were coated in a brilliant layer of gold foil conductor. The foil was charged by nickel cadmium cells, easy to maintain and replace and refill with electrolyte. The charged foil maintained an electromagnetic field around each suit, protecting us from high levels of solar radiation, like the kind coming from Utu's red sun, Alpha Nel.

By the third day of our trek, the electrolyte levels in Johansen's suit batteries were running low, and we had no water to spare. We found that one of her cells had been ruptured, a hairline crack, perhaps sustained even before the mission began a month ago, or in the crash-landing. Saturday closed the flap over her battery pack and sighed grimly. I checked Johansen's field with my EMF meter. The readings weren't good. She was already soaking up rads like a sponge, but I didn't see any point in telling her the truth. I was glad she couldn't see my undoubtedly pessimistic expression through the gold visor shielding. We'd all be dead soon anyway.

"Your levels are getting low," I sugar-coated it. "We'd better find shelter soon."

Saturday's chuckle came wheezing and rattling over our comms. "You know what they say about this sector, the one between Utu, Enkal, and Sera? They call it the Interplanetary Bermuda Triangle. Never gave it a second thought in all these years. It's not even a triangle, for god's sake. But maybe there's something to it after all."

Quirk gave Saturday a shove, sending Saturday sprawling to the blue sands. "I thought I told you to shut up," Quirk growled.

Saturday was struggling to get up. I grabbed him by an arm and guided him to his feet.

"Let's go," was Quirk's stern command, and we followed him, little golden pilgrims in the deep blue wastes.

We had been reckoning to the azure foothills of some vast and distant mountain range, and now I thought that we were within a few hours of their slopes. We labored onward; occasionally Johansen would stumble, but would regain her composure and say nothing. She was strong. She refused to acknowledge her looming mortality.

Dunes rose up before us, and we clambered, with some difficulty, over them. Saturday's hypoxic wheezing grew louder. I wondered with each step whether he would be able to make another. Soon the dunes became sparser and steeper inclines, and then we were slowly ascending those foothills that had once seemed so unattainable. Quirk continued the climb doggedly, and we began falling behind him. I watched him growing smaller and smaller, his suit glinting in Alpha Nel's harsh light, the dense atmosphere obscuring his features, and finally he vanished over the summit.

I felt an icy dread in my gut. I knew Quirk wouldn't abandon us, and at the top we'd catch a glimpse of him again on the other side, but the anxiety I felt when he disappeared from sight was sudden and overwhelming. I pushed myself to climb faster in that instant, dropping to all fours, a bear crawl, clawing at the blue sand, pulling myself to the top. My breath was thin and short, my head getting light. But I was almost there. Just a few more strides. Keep going. Keep going.

And then I was there. I was at the top, and I didn't even notice that Quirk was waiting for me, for us. My gaze was fixed on something I could now see in the distance from that vantage, something vacillating through atmospheric soup like heat waves.

It was a structure.

Perhaps structure was the wrong word for it. Perhaps that designation was too banal, too uninspired. And this... thing, this cathedral of crystals and glittering stones, cropping up from the blue sands was nothing if not inspiring.

Quirk pounded on the hatch.

The structure towered overhead, catching the daylight in its myriad facets, twinkling prismatically. Its four primary spires were constructed of something like pink quartz and the blue stones of Utu. Around the eastern fringe of the basilica was an ambulatory of those same blue stones, flecked with pink crystal. The columned path wound around a cloister, a plot of raked sand, with a perimeter of blue boulders opposite of the ambulatory. The building continued to stretch back further than its impressive spires were tall, and at the far end was a semicircle of domed apsidal vestries, like satellites, each topped with spires shorter than, but similarly intricate as those four that composed the facade.

We could almost hear those impossibly tall spires ringing, like the low, resounding hum after a chime is struck, as they swayed imperceptibly in Utu's jet streams.

Cursing under his breath, Quirk banged his gloved fist on the door again. The hatch was a heavy circular airlock set into the facade below an ornate, pointed archway, an archway which leaned out at its pinnacle, providing some very appreciated shade.

I studied the relief carvings of the facade as Quirk pounded and pounded again. There were many depictions, in those blue stones, of the sun. One portrayed the sun, perhaps Alpha Nel, as a smooth orb with sharp spines of light fanning out around it, a phalanx. In another the sun was a jagged ball of licking flames. Another showed the star with wavering appendages of light.

I began realizing that accompanying these striking sun reliefs were also reliefs of their systems. Not every sun was the same, and neither were their solar systems. I was able to discern Alpha Nel by the configuration of the planets orbiting it, but the others--I wasn't sure.

And then we heard the airlock hiss.

"Oh, thank god," Johansen whispered.

The hatch slid open and Quirk eagerly stepped inside. The others followed, but I hesitated. It all seemed too good to be true, if you know where I'm coming from. Quirk gestured vehemently for me to follow, so finally I did.

We were within a viaduct which was sealed, when the outer hatch behind us closed, at both ends. The space was cylindrical, and we stood on a raised grating. There were various sensors suspended on wires on either side of the platform, and vents inset into the bulkhead. Some of the atmospheric vapors from outside had drifted into the room with us when we'd entered, and I noticed them slowly being pulled into the vents.

And then suddenly we were blasted by plumes of steam, hissing and spitting from above us, and when the steam cleared, the next hatch, at the end of the viaduct, was open.

Quirk passed through the opening first, then Johansen and Saturday. I was the last. We passed into the long narthex of the cathedral, which with its high, ribbed walls, vanishing into the shadows overhead, seemed incongruously narrow when considering the size of the place. At the end of the corridor, I could see that it opened up into a circular chancel, flanked by columns. Two great shafts of natural light, tinctured coral, fell at 45-degree angles from immense pink quartz portals. The beams met at the altar, which was made of some strange metal, like solid quicksilver.

Running low on oxygen, Saturday was the first to remove his helmet as we entered the nave. I made to warn him--we didn't know what the air composition was like in here--but I was already too late. He removed the gold dome and flung it to the floor and drew in a deep breath. He fell to his knees and began coughing. I started toward him, but he waved me away, laughing and sputtering. "I'm fine. I'm fine."

We other three shared apprehensive glances. We could not make out those looks through each other's visor, but our body language was unmistakable.

Still, Quirk removed his next. He held his breath for a moment and clenched his eyelids, as if he was having second thoughts, but at last he breathed. He opened his eyes wide, perhaps surprised he was still alive, and gave us a brusque nod. Johansen took hers off next. Somewhat reluctantly I followed suit. The air was sweet, perfumed by incense.

"Welcome," a voice said when all of our helmets were removed, and we turned. There amongst the blue stone pillars was a man; a rather short man, with a jolly face and gray hair tied back in a tight bun. He was wearing peculiar clothes, too: a black- and white-striped vest over a collarless shirt, sleeves rolled up to his knobby elbows; black Turkish trousers tucked into high white stockings; and little black slippers on his feet.

"This is the Church of the Family of Stars," he said. He made a broad, histrionic gesture to the domed ceiling over us; to the quartz portals above the pillars; to that quicksilver altar.

None of us said anything. We were stunned, I guess. Maybe we'd all been so sure we'd die out there that this salvation didn't seem to make any sense.

The little old man filled the void of silence. "I am Verj. What are your names?"

Still we said nothing. Verj's gaze swept slowly over us. It was warm and inviting, amiable.

Finally, I shook myself out of my stupor and stepped forward. I said, "My name's Cobb."

Verj gave a broad smile, but then something happened. Quirk stepped in front of me. His shoulders were heaving with each breath. I saw Verj's expression darken, something like fear.

"What the hell is this place?" Quirk demanded. "What the hell are you doing out here?"

Johansen, Saturday, and I stood back and watched feebly. Verj raised his open hands to Quirk as an act of good faith.

"Please," the little man said. "Please, don't be afraid. I realize this must all seem very strange."

"You're damn right!" Quirk interjected.

"Let me finish. Please," Verj begged. "I am the only one here. There is no need to be fearful. I have been here alone since the companies withdrew their resources from Utu."

"I thought everyone had been evacuated," I contributed, and then reiterated, "Everyone."

"Yes, everyone," Verj said, still frightened and staring up at the imposing brute that was Quirk. "Everyone but me."

As Verj told it, construction of the Church of the Family of Stars had begun two decades ago, guided by an eccentric architect named Kamil Larsen. The cathedral was not meant for the miners that had been brought here for Utu's precious ore. Rather it was built for the company colonists. They were the ones that ran things, oversaw the mining and the shipping of materials to Digi. They were the ones preparing Utu to one day be a bustling hub of export, and eventually import as well, as the permanent labor colonies would inexorably spread throughout the blue deserts.

But the ore mined from Utu proved to be a bust. Costs for extracting and shipping the material were so high, that by the time the stuff reached Digi, only a few depots were able to afford it. The companies that started the ore rush on Utu were just as quick to pull everyone out of here as well. They cut their losses and ran.

"So why did you stay?" I asked. The five of us were sitting in a circle in a cool crypt chamber beneath the church.

"None of us had anywhere else to go," Verj replied. "I wasn't the only one who tried to stay here. There was nothing for us back on Digi but violence and poverty. We were miners, but on Digi what was there to mine?"

Quirk jumped in. "So what happened to the others who tried to stay?"

"All dead or arrested by the companies, I think. I hid down here, in the crypt. It's a labyrinth. Larsen liked puzzles. They were his favorite things. Their complexity reminded him of the complexity of his religion's mythology; the complexity of his own faith. I nearly died down here, but eventually I found my way back to the surface. Others were not so lucky. I've found raggedy old corpses down here," his eyes glimmered in the light of torches that lined the damp cellar walls. "But I've never found another survivor."

I asked, "Why stay here? Won't they come back to this church, to the mines; reclaim some their equipment and materials?"

Verj smiled. "I don't know. I don't think they will be back, but only because they haven't been back in three years. I suppose they could return, but I also think there would have to be a very good reason. They left the colonies ghost towns. The price of transporting all of this was too much for their bottom lines. It's no one's now. It's Utu's."

He continued, "As to why I stay here, specifically, well, I've grown quite fond of the church. I'm its caretaker now, just as it was my caretaker when I needed to evade the company men. I believe I'm in this place, that I was chosen by this place, to carry on the work of Kamil Larsen. When I was down here, hiding, I came across his studio, a chamber at the center of the crypt. It held all of his designs for the church, a time capsule of ambition."

The torches flickered as if a sixth person had entered the room.

"Larsen died five years ago, off world," Verj explained. "He was back in Digi, actually. Killed in a traffic accident. What a shame. Without him and without his designs, the companies that had commissioned the church halted its construction. For two years, the cathedral remained static, unfinished but sufficient for its primary purpose as a place of worship. And then the colonies were abandoned, too."

There was a victorious flicker in his eyes as he added, "But I was here. And I had Larsen's designs. I've mapped out every extant inch of this place in my mind, and I've memorized and prioritized every future addition as well. I still go up there and lay bricks. I still sculpt the blue clay and chisel the blue stones. By the time I die, the church will finally be complete."

"You're still building here." Johansen's words formed more of an astonished statement than a question. Verj nodded, triumphantly.

Johansen was in bad shape that night.

Verj had a medical center below the chevet, and he took her there for some rest. Quirk was reluctant to let him have her, but Saturday said that he would stay with Johansen and make sure nothing happened.

After he took Johansen and Saturday to medical, Verj showed Quirk and I back to that room in the crypt, at the bottom of the stairs, where he'd told us the history of this place. He lit the torches again and led us down a long, umbrous cavern, stopping at a chamber to the right. He lit a torch within the room and we could see that there were white cots on the dirt floor.

"I'm sorry that I don't have more comfortable accommodations for you gentlemen," he said, "but for all its grandeur, I'm afraid the church isn't exactly homey. That wasn't one of Larsen's considerations, I suppose."

He told us that he'd have a nice breakfast ready for us in the morning and he left us there, his tiny footsteps fading down the long, dark corridor.

I guess I still couldn't believe it. How had we survived out here? We were dead for sure. I was so damned sure of it, I'd made my peace with it. I was ready. So, how did we end up here?

Then Quirk's voice interrupted my introspection. "Goddamn lunatic," he grumbled. "Probably gonna kill us in our sleep; take our gear and our supplies; make religious icons from our bones."

We both woke several hours later, unharmed, to my delight.

We followed the hall the way we had come with Verj, but we were already getting a sense of how truly disorienting the crypt's branching passages could be. Finally, by using the still-smoldering torches like trail markers, we found our way back to staircase that spiraled into the labyrinth from the church above.

Verj was on his way through the cathedral as we reached the top. "Oh, good," he exclaimed with glee. "You're up. I've prepared a feast."

He took us to the apse of the cathedral. Even after seeing how immense this place was, the walk seemed inordinately long, and I didn't want to have to walk ever again in my life; not after those last three days. The mess hall was in a ventricle of the crypt beneath the chevet, accessed by another staircase, and we met Saturday there, medical being no more than a city block from mess, he told us.

The mess hall was drab and damp, like the rest of the caverns, with a rustic wooden table stretched from one end to the other. The table was piled high with plates and bowls of fresh fruit and vegetables and with loaves of bread. I stood there, unable to disguise my amazement or my hunger.

"Larsen built a greenhouse just behind the cloister," Verj said with a grin. "Has it been a very long time since you've had good food?"

I didn't respond. I merely stuck my fingers in a bowl of blackberry jam, and licked the gooey sweetness from them.

"It's even better on bread," the little man laughed, clapping his hands joyfully.

We sat on benches at the table and shoveled the food into our mouths. Strawberries and peaches. Grapes and nectarines. Honey and jam and bread. No one said a word, not even "thanks," but Verj seemed very pleased simply by our enjoyment of the food. We ate until our slicksuits, the ones that we wore beneath our exosuits, which were all that we were wearing now, felt too tight. And we laughed.

It still didn't seem real.

After breakfast, Saturday went back to check on Johansen, and Quirk went back to the airlocks, where he could replenish our oxygen canisters and find something to seal the fractured cell in Johansen's suit, maybe epoxy. Meanwhile I sneaked away, back into the crypt. I'd seen Verj duck down into those caves earlier, and I wanted to speak with him.

I descended into the cellars, and I made my way through their dark corridors, following the torches Verj had lit as he had gone. I felt a chill as I recalled what he had said about finding bodies down here, lost forever in this maze.

The corridors forked and twisted. At times I felt that I was doubling back the way I'd come. The disorientation was maddening, but at last I spotted a lit chamber ahead. I approached and looked in, and there was Verj, sitting on a little stool and smoothing blue clay on a potter's wheel. He looked up at me and grinned.

"Come in! Come in!" he beckoned.

"What are you doing?" I inquired.

"I'm making a new sun," he answered. "Kamil Larsen was from Enkal. They worship the stars there. The church is a church to the stars. Alpha Nel and her sisters."

"Oh, it's a she, is it," I said with a smirk.

"All of the gods are women," he confided. "A man cannot give birth to a child let alone a universe."

I crossed the room and took a seat on the work bench behind him. There was an old, tarnished exosuit hanging in the corner. It had some hydraulic augmentations running along the limbs and, I guessed, probably up the spine, too. I thought the attachments must have been to amplify the wearer's strength.

Verj glanced back and caught me inspecting it. "It was Larsen's. A tad too big for me, but I make due."

"Verj," I said, "how did I come to be here? I was dead, but now I'm here in a strange place that I don't understand."

"This isn't heaven, if that's what you're asking," he admitted with a wink. "I was like you once, Cobb. I didn't believe in anything, really. But there comes a time when you can no longer reconcile proof of providence with your own lack of faith."

He continued sculpting and concluded, "Remember: I should have been dead, too."

When I went back to the surface, Quirk was waiting for me. There was a sly grin smeared across his face, and his eyes were dark.

"I have a plan," he said.

The next day, I spoke with Saturday. Johansen was getting worse, the rate of her cells' deterioration accelerating. She was vomiting blood. She was dying. Verj was doing all he could, but now that was not enough.

Saturday didn't cry. It wasn't like him to show affection for anyone but himself. He just stared off into those pink portals looking down on the altar.

Then suddenly his eyes shifted to the altar itself, that massive quicksilver slab before its reredos, and he wondered, "Do you believe what Quirk says about that thing?"

I didn't want to think about it. "I don't know. I've never seen the stuff."

I found myself back in the workshop, below ground, later. Verj was cutting stone with a mallet and chisel. I'd never seen anything like it before, except maybe on National Geographic. I decided to help him. He showed me how. It took several tries to get it right, and even then I suspected Verj was just humoring me.

It's funny. All of those years rocketing around in space, encapsulated by modern marvel, and it was working with my hands that finally made me feel fulfilled.

Verj made idle talk as we worked. He asked me what I did. I told him that I was an engineer, which wasn't a lie. In a past life I had been, and it was handy trait on board a ship.

"What brought you to the stars then, Cobb?"

I thought a moment. "I had nowhere else to go. Like you."

It was true. There was no such thing as a job opening back in Digi. You either already had work, or you never would.

"The stars brought you to the stars," he claimed. "They brought you to them."

When we had finished shaping our stones, Verj donned the tarnished suit, teetering on the hydraulic legs which were just a hair too long for him. I offered to take the stones up to the scaffolding behind the facade in his stead, but he assured me that he was fine. He put on his helmet and hefted the stones up into his arms, the hydraulics hissing and clicking, and he stomped out into the caverns and was gone.

I waited there, for him to return. I don't know why. It would have been easy to just go through with Quirk's scheme. Verj was a weak, little old man. It would have been simple. We'd done worse things.

But I couldn't bring myself to go along with it. I saw in the church something I'd been missing for so long. Maybe it was something that I'd never had to begin with.

I shaped things with my bare hands that day, molded them into being. I felt their energy in my bones as I chiseled them and formed them. There was something primal and satisfying about that work. This was what I was meant to be doing.

"That's gotta be the biggest damned hunk of Utu ore I've ever seen," Quirk had said the day before, relaying his plan to me. "We could get at least 15 million digs for it, maybe more."

He had been referring to the altar.

I'd tried to reason with him then, saying that, if our handlers had in fact intercepted our distress signal, they were certainly waiting until they knew we were dead before sending another party come lift the cargo from the Volante and take it to Sera themselves. What would keep these new guns from simply killing us and taking the ore from us as well?

Saturday had been despondent, maybe wasn't even listening. But Quirk had been adamant.

"Well, we can't stay here," he'd argued. "This could be our ticket home, if we play it right."

I heard Verj come plodding down the corridor in his hydraulic suit again. When he entered, he didn't misread my dour expression. He stopped and looked puzzled.

"Verj," I told him, "I'm a smuggler."

The plan was simple: tell Verj that we needed to retrieve our cargo from the ship; wait until the salvage crew from our handlers arrived at the crash site; then bait the second stringers with our find at the cathedral.

Ok, so it wasn't that simple. We didn't know exactly what we would do once we got the new guys to follow us back to the church. Quirk thought we could trap them in the viaduct between the airlocks and then commandeer their ship, but that relied on precise timing and a lot of luck. Maybe they'd be runners that we were already tight with, and they'd just give us a lift back to Digi out of the kindness of their hearts. That was Saturday's input. Quirk and I glared at him.

I brought up another strong possibility: the salvage crew could have come and gone already, leaving us here for dead.

In that case, our best shot at getting off of Utu was recharging the Volante's backup batteries at the cathedral and then retuning our distress beacon for a universal emergency channel.

We knew what we needed to do. It was the getting it done that was getting in the way.

On our fourth day at the unfinished church, we decided it was time. We sold Verj on our lie, and he agreed to keep his eyes open for our return. We donned the suits and went through the viaduct and into the Utu desert once again.

Verj told me before we left not to expect Johansen to last until we got back. I kept that information to myself. No sense in distracting the others with this new mission looming.

The outer airlock sealed behind us. Quirk had maintained our suits while we stayed at the church: replenishing our oxygen supplies, refilling our battery cells, and restocking our liquid sustenance from the church pantry. Alpha Nel was just rising, a deep red, over the blue hills we'd traversed only days before. I took a steadying breath, preparing myself for what lay ahead, and set out toward those foothills, and Quirk and Saturday followed.

We would do as we'd done before. We would walk until we couldn't walk any further, and then we would rest only a few hours. Then we would resume our hike.

We made it to the hills and struggled up them. It seemed more difficult now, as if we marched toward death, this time, rather than from it. We didn't stop, though. We just climbed and climbed. And eventually, out of breath and with legs that felt gelatinous, we came to the crest.

"What the hell is that?" we heard Saturday whisper over the comms.

I looked out over the dunes. It didn't take long for me to find it, too. A group of people, five of them, in gold exosuits crossed the blue sands, following our faint, days-old tracks. They were barely visible through the rippling atmosphere, but the glint of their suits was instantly familiar.

Saturday, who'd been down on his hands and knees, exhausted, scrambled quickly to his feet and began flailing his arms.

"Hey! We're up here!" he shouted.

"Keep your voice down, idiot!" snarled Quirk. "They're out of range. Our comms haven't synced with theirs yet."

So, we waited there at the top of that hill, and the other group approached, and then began their ascent. As they got closer we could see that two of them were dragging a box of equipment up the incline. The other three had high-frequency emissions rifles slung over their shoulders. Our comms crackled then as we synced, and we could hear them grunting and gasping as they made their way up.

When they neared the summit, we reached down for them. They clasped our gloved hands in theirs and we pulled them up. Then they helped their last two compatriots, the ones with the black equipment case, up as well.

It took them a few minutes to catch their breaths and compose themselves. The first one to do so said, panting, "That you, Quirk?"

"I'm here," Quirk confirmed. "I recognize that voice. Stagg?"

Stagg laughed, still panting, and slapped Quirk on the back. "Long time, pal," he said.

I'd never met Stagg, but I'd heard Quirk talk about their misadventures from time to time. When they'd first starting running, they were partners.

"Damn, it's so good to see you guys," Quirk said.

Stagg responded, "You, too, man. We thought y'all were dead."

"How the hell did you survive out here anyway?" one of Stagg's crew asked.

There was something strange about the situation; a tension that Quirk wasn't sensing, but I could feel it surging through the air.

Saturday piped up. "We found a church."

"A church," Stagg repeated. "You finally found god, eh, Quirk?"

They both laughed.

"So tell me about this church," Stagg requested.

"There's a company refugee keeping up this cathedral," (Quirk pointed through the haze to the church in the distance), "And he's got the biggest uncut piece of Utu metal I've ever laid my eyes on, Stagg."

Stagg was peering off toward the cathedral. "Yeah?" he said at length.

"I was thinking," continued Quirk, "we get you the ore, split the digs, and you give us a lift home. Whatta you say?"

"I say you've misread the situation here," one of Stagg's crew interjected. He unslung his rifle.

"What the hell's going on here?" Quirk looked to Stagg for some explanation, but Stagg continued to stare off at the church.

"Which one of you three can take us to the ore, then?" another of Stagg's men demanded.

Saturday, stupid Saturday, spoke then. "We all can," he confessed.

"Wonderful," the man with the rifle said.

The two crew members without rifles grabbed Saturday and threw him to his knees. Quirk grabbed Stagg by the shoulders and shook him.

"What is this?" he screamed.

In one swift motion, Stagg unslung his rifle and swung the butt of it into Quirk's helmet, sending Quirk reeling to the ground.

The two men that had shoved Saturday to his knees were stepping away from him now, and the man with the HE rifle took aim, sights set on Saturday.

"C'mon, guys," Saturday was mewling. "What are you doing? C'mon. Please."

But then the man with the rifle pulled his trigger. Saturday yelped, and I could see his suit's electromagnetic aurora begin shimmering, visibly. The wavering field receded then, from the point over his chest where the emissions were striking him to a pinpoint at the small of his back where the field was finally extinguished.

"Please!" Saturday was begging. "Please! Stop!"

The gold foil on his suit sparked and flared. Instinctively I put my hands up to guard my eyes from the bright flashes. The foil was blistering and peeling away now. Saturday was sobbing over the comms.

When the man with the rifle finally released his trigger, there was a scorched patch of unshielded insulation over Saturday's sternum. He would be dead in a matter of hours; maybe minutes. The man re-slung his HER, and grabbed Saturday under the arm. Saturday was whimpering incoherently. The man flung him down the steep slope Stagg's crew had just climbed. Saturday tumbled like a rag doll to the bottom.

Stagg and his men took us at gunpoint back to the Church of the Family of Stars.

"I'm sorry about all of this," Stagg had said. "Your handlers paid me to pick up your cargo," adding, "and to make sure you wouldn't cause anymore problems for them."

When we reached the outer hatch of the church, one of the riflemen calibrated his HER and then aimed the weapon at the airlock. There was a high-pitched ringing when he pulled the trigger, and after a while we heard a loud clunk come from the hatch. Then, as the rifleman stepped back, another crewman retrieved something like a pry bar from the equipment case, and jammed the tool into the thin seal of the door. The airlock eased open as the man applied torque to the bar.

Within the viaduct, the same measures were taken to open the inner hatch. Opening that door turned the passageway into a wind tunnel as the atmospheric pressures within and without the church equilibrated. I staggered and fell, but found myself being pulled to my feet by one of Stagg's men.

We pressed on into the narrow narthex against the buffeting equilibration. I wished silently that Verj would still be wearing Larsen's suit. Otherwise, with the church's atmospheric integrity compromised, he would be killed instantly.

We came into the nave and stopped.

"So, where's this piece of metal?" Stagg grumbled impatiently. "We don't have much more time to spare for anymore detours."

Quirk stood motionless, looking ahead at the reredos. There was no altar before the backdrop.

"It was right here," Quirk whispered.

One if Stagg's men put his HER barrel to Quirk's helmet.

"Verj," I interrupted. "The refugee. He must have taken it into the crypt. We know the way down there. We can show you where he took it."

I led them to the spiral staircase that went down into the cellars. They gestured with their rifles for Quirk and I to descend them first, so we did. The five crew members, discarding their cumbersome equipment case, followed cautiously when we reached the bottom.

The Utu atmosphere was still pushing through the caverns down here, howling through the labyrinth.

Stagg and his men didn't know it was a labyrinth, though. For all they knew, we were in a wine cellar, and the multiple cavern mouths that branched out under the church were just entrances to various chambers full of wine barrels. That's what friars did, right? Made wine and spirits?

I started down an unlit corridor, Quirk, Stagg, and the others fastidiously on my heels. The riflemen had their HERs at the ready. I slid the gold shielding up from my visor and back into my helmet as the crypt shadows closed in. The others successively did the same. My infrared display flickered on, green and black and grainy.

The labyrinth sprawled in every direction before me, tunnels like impossible wormholes, twisting and writhing beneath the church. I took the turns I had memorized, the ones I'd taken to Verj's workshop. Two days ago, I would already be lost, frantic, searching. But I had had the torches Verj had lit to follow. Now, Stagg and his men did not have those torches. They only had me.

I heard Stagg curse under his breath and then he hissed, "Goddamn flares were in the case of equipment. You didn't tell us this was a maze."

But it was already too late to go back for them. They would never find their way.

"Just a little farther," I lied.

I was about to dart down a passage to my left, and then hook a quick right and double back, leaving Quirk and Stagg and the rest of them hopelessly lost down here, like Verj and I had planned, when I saw it.

It was the altar, tipped over onto its smooth edge. As I approached, I could see that sticking out, beneath that quicksilver slab, was a little arm in a baggy exosuit sleeve, its hydraulic augmentation severed and leaking its fluids into the dirt. The suit must have just been a bit too big, too unwieldy, this time. Verj had been crushed to death, but he had achieved our goal before doing so.

I felt a rage building in my chest, seething. I spun and struck Quirk on the helmet with my fists, sending him sprawling into Stagg's riflemen.

Then I ran.

They chased me. I could still hear Stagg cursing and barking out orders over comms.

"Find that bastard!" he was shouting.

I took a right, then a left, then another right. The sounds of their boots pounding through the caverns were growing fainter behind me. Stagg's obscenities faded, too, and my comms went dead. They were gone. Quirk, Stagg, Verj, Johansen, Saturday. All gone now.

We were deep in the crypt. We would all die down here, like the ones Verj had found when he'd first started exploring these wandering corridors. I wondered what my purpose was, then. Why had I been saved from imminent death just to die down here now, like this. It didn't make any sense to me. Where was Verj's providence now? What was the point?

Verj had planned to meet me in the crypt, after I'd evaded the others, and he would have led me back to the surface. But now I was alone. I was alone just as he had been when the company men came for him.

I took a moment to gather my bearings. I turned one way: the corridor split there. I turned another: the corridor made a sharp turn and disappeared. I was directionless. I recognized none of this.

I was panicking.

I wanted to give up, to just sit against the brick walls there until my suit's batteries went dead, or until I ran out of oxygen or sustenance. I wanted to die.

But then I looked at that sharp turn that the passage made, and I felt as though, if I could just make it around that corner, I would find something. I would find my way back. It was an unreasonable hope, but one that demanded I try. And so I rose to my feet again and controlled my respirations, steadying myself against the bulkhead. An irrational calm fell over me.

As I rounded that corner, I found myself in a chamber. On my visor, I saw the concave infrared display picking up fuzzy details of the room around me: a wooden chair; a work bench; a plaster model of the completed Church of the Family of Stars. I saw what the cathedral would look like once it was truly finished, and it was breathtaking. This was the studio; the one Verj had discovered, at the very center of the crypt.

And on the work bench, I found a scroll. The parchment depicted a tangle of black lines, an intricate web of passageways. It was a layout; Larsen's layout of the crypt.

THE END

Bio: Mr. Horn is a US Marine Corps veteran and current student of Physics at University of California, San Diego. His short fiction has appeared in Self-Publisher! Magazine and Asylum Ink. In addition, dozens of his editorials, interviews, and reviews have appeared on the popular ComicBookBin.com.

E-mail: Daniel Nathan Horn

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