Nano Writing Month, 2017.19

[mc776]

Every day, write some bit of fiction. Preferably over 50 words, but there will be no standard beyond "something". Posting is entirely optional.

"What if they were delicious?"

Literally Orgoth's entire outline became tense and jagged. "No."

"Cap's got a point," I said. "They've been eating each other as long as we've been watching them. Can't all be just the fact that there's nothing else here to eat."

"But it is true that there really is, if not nothing, then very little else here to eat," said Finkelstein. "I've seen them chew on mould and weeds and pick up and eat some of these maggot-like things, but surely that can't even begin to compare in nutritional value to a large animal."

"Maybe they just really hate each other," said Gunnerbot. "They can't burn each other or anything, and they might not know how to dig or think burial is too dignified or something, and smashing them to bits would take too long, so eating someone is the best way to get them out of your sight."

"Might be hygienic, make sure nothing rots to spread the plague or something. Like cats when their owner dies."

"But why not bury them then? They have knives for hands, they can dig better than cats!"

"Touché. Waste not want not, though?"

"Well, I'm still curious. But I suppose we should wrap up the actual investigation first." The captain had developed a bit of a reputation over the years for reinforcing the "all-devouring Terran plains ape" stereotype in the wild outbacks of numerous worlds.

No traps of any sort were found in the building. It seemed like Guillaume had been in a hurry to go, so none from him either. There were a couple uneaten and partially-eaten remains in the nave, though the hallways had been cleared out: all seemed at least a couple days old (though Finkelstein strictly warned us not to put too much on their estimates just yet before we learned anything about the maggot-things' life cycle).

There were no pews in the nave. I'm not sure what pews for snake-people might have looked like, come to think of it. The altar was out in the open at the end of the nave: a rectangular stone bench, about the size of a dinner table fit for a family of seven, atop a pyramid of stairs forming concentric rectangles. The proportions of the rectangle were golden ratio.

The top of the altar was recessed in, a rectangular pit or fountain about a foot deep. Holes in the bottom of the recess drained away the rainwater from the other night. At the bottom of this pit, with about a half inch clearance on each side from the walls of the pit, was a battered, weathered, chipped slab of what appeared to be gold.

"Now why would that bastard not take--" Captain Alvarez stopped herself as she noticed the numerous fresh chisel, crowbar, hammer and blaster marks all over the inner surface of the pit, and the broken crowbar and hammer and empty blaster cell that lay nearby. He tried.

There were numerous chunks of stone, and dust of the same colour, on top of the golden slab. The material was much darker and more uniform than the decaying green marble that characterized the altar and much of the rest of the building. On a hunch, I reached in and fitted the pieces together. They formed a base on top of the slab, with a hollow, thick cylinder protruding upwards from it, the end decorated with a lip as though some other cylindrical object should fit into it. Such an object would have been roughly the size and shape of the handle of a tennis racquet, more or less.

"Cap, does this breakage look fresh to you?"

She stared blankly at it and shrugged. "Finkelstein?"

"The edges look crisp enough. Some of the dust has collected in this puddle as well, which suggests that it got into this condition before the storm, but not so long before that other sources of rainfall might have washed all of it away already."

"So we're looking for some kind of rod that used to be on this altar?" Orgoth looked around at the walls. "What kind of god are we dealing with here, anyway?"

The carvings were pretty badly mangled. They seemed to depict a lot of snake-people building and doing things. No grim reaper in here, thank goodness. We were hard-pressed to find anything singling out any particular personage: there were a few rulers and princes sitting in high places in some scenes, but they were not given any important prominence otherwise and Gunnerbot thought they looked like generic stand-ins rather than any particular individuals. Unlike in the narthex, battle scenes were conspicuously absent.

"There is no god," said the captain after a moment. "This temple is dedicated to the best their people had. These murals must have been about their most important achievements."

"They all look like they were defaced specifically in the parts showing those achievements." Finkelstein ran their hand over a scummy, scratched slab of lumpy rock framed by yet-recognizable depictions of stars and ringed planets and the remains of a bespectacled figure.

"Yeah, I think I saw a couple scientists' faces clawed off on this one. Looks like they were cloning something?"

"And this one... these pits look oddly familiar... definitely looks like a star map, but where is this?"

Gunnerbot chimed in. "That's what the sky would look like from here!" Finkelstein immediately stepped back and took another couple pictures.

Captain Alvarez looked over to see what the fuss was about and glanced a bit past the stars. "What's that over there? It looks like a pregnant fish with a really fat ass. Well, tail."

"Rocket engines, Captain. The extra bulk is for reaction mass. It seems they never developed etheric sails or hyperspace drives and never travelled beyond their system. Which makes sense, given everything else we've seen."

Orgoth went back to the altar. "Jae, are you sure this thing was busted recently? Like, reasonably positive this was a few days and not a zillion years ago?"

"Well, it's definitely not 'a zillion years ago', if you mean anything comparable to the various times at which these carvings had been defaced. But I can't say for sure it was Guillaume who did it during his last visit here or if he or someone else might have come by days, possibly weeks before."

"That just raises a new question then. The folks who did the defacing - I'll assume they were the artists' angry-faced successors - why would they leave perfectly intact the one most central piece sticking out of the middle of altar?" I thought about the various times our church had been torched or smashed by stardeth-addled neo-Soviet punks: they had no idea where to find any presanctified host or even the chalice, but they never, ever neglected to knock over the candelabra.

"I wonder if I could--" Orgoth's blood-curdling scream rang through the nave, fading rapidly under the crescendo of a loud, crashing and rumbling that was echoing even through the entire roofless building. Then another, less blood-curdling and more ear-splitting sound messed with our feels as he apparently remembered his emergency rockets and launched himself back into the nave, crash-landing into a pile of them bones. Smoke and dust and maggots and poo everywhere.

"Orgoth! Situation report! Wet check! Are you hurt?" I ran over to him as I got out the disinfectant, tissue stabilizer gel and insulation foam. Mycanthropes don't have bones to break and don't bleed easily, but their tissues could be crushed or severed, and Orgoth of course had a lot more delicate metal and plastic bits than most.

He whined something I couldn't hear over Gunnerbot crying. I ordered him to do a wet check on threat of me molesting him myself. He did and confirmed he was fine, just winded, and his left side would probably be a nice shade of olive green tomorrow. No symptoms of a concussion. Monocle's fine, but it's rebooting because the battery had fallen out. He could check the other augs back on the ship, he could walk without them if need be.

The captain and Finkelstein had their guns trained on the altar. The Trashpanda was standing on its own emergency bipod and pointed itself in the same way as Gunnerbot took control of it (while crying). The rumbling and crashing had come to a stop. Orgoth eventually gave him - and me - sufficient assurances that he was substantially not-untrivially-harmed.

Nothing happened for a few minutes. Finkelstein launched a mini-aerodrone to investigate the altar.

Where there used to be the tablet and the broken rod-base was now a rectangular shaft leading down to the unknown black depths below the city.