Chapter 4: The Beckoning Abyss

"This room is different," Ryder said, peering cautiously past the edge of the archway, gun pointing into the room as she made a quick survey, but the only thing she saw was a broken pillar in the center of the room blocking a hole in the ground. It was one of a dozen they had visited since their last return to their camp hours ago, but this was the first time that they approached a room and nothing shot at them, nor did anything else happen.

"No bots this time," Akksul agreed from the other side. With a glance at her as if to seek her agreement before deciding he didn't need it, he entered the room and turned about.

When nothing attacked him, Akksul took a few more paces towards the pillar, lowering his gun. Ryder followed him, but before she took a full step the pillar abruptly came to life, sputtering and sending sparks in the air. A deep rumble made the floor vibrate and it sent loose rubble tumbling into the hole the pillar was blocking, but other than that, it didn't seem to do anything. Ryder bit her tongue to keep from telling Akksul to be careful; she didn't want him thinking her skittish or concerned for him, but something about the pillar made her uneasy, especially because it seemed to react to Akksul's proximity. After all, there had been far too many things down here reacting to them in unpleasant ways.

"Well, well," Akksul mused, reaching out to the pillar and just as his fingertips touched it, a swirl of symbols appeared above it, flickering faintly, but enough to make them out. "This is no ordinary pillar."

"Is that…?" Ryder stepped up beside him, tilting her head towards him to try to make out the symbols. Not that she could understand any of it without SAM; the thought was like a fist clenching around her heart and with a deep breath to steady her nerves she tried to put the AI out of her mind. She glanced at Akksul, but forgot what she was going to say when she realized he had been studying her curiously as she studied the pillar. Maybe wondering what her conclusions were? She couldn't decide.

Akksul immediately fastened his eyes on the symbols, tracing them in the air. "I've seen this inscription before…" After a long moment, he shook his head. "It is too fragmented to make anything out, the damage in the pillar must be extensive."

"Look at the placement, though," Ryder said, running her fingers on the pillar's surface. "It's the only pillar we've seen since we encountered the sparks that hasn't turned blue and it's blocking something," she crouched down and tried to peer into the darkness. "It's almost like it was deliberately pushed here to keep something from coming out."

"Something must have gone wrong in this place," Akksul said. "This smells of a crude patch to fix a larger problem."

"Those bots we've encountered so far… they were very wild in a way I haven't seen in other Remnant bots," Ryder continued, standing and facing him. "This whole node we've been exploring is a little different than the rest of the place, as if it was added on as an afterthought, but it's this place that looks much more like what I would expect a Remnant site to be like."

Ryder swept her eyes around the room again, spotting several ledges and haphazardly positioned pillars that seemed almost strange compared to the room just a corridor away. They had ventured deep into the structure and a map was beginning to draw up in Ryder's mind that reminded her of a neural net; dozens of corridors connected 'nodes' which lead off into several rooms like this one, yet most interesting of all was the rigid symmetry in it all. If she went from a central node to one on the left that had four adjoining rooms, she would most certainly find an identical node to the right with an equal number of rooms. Each room and node had equidistant pillars that ringed it, ferrofluid coursing along its edges and the only thing that set the rooms apart from the nodes were their size and the daises that yawned open when they approached, disgorging copious amounts of smaller or larger bots. Twice they had been in a room that had the sparks, too, which sent them running; luckily those never gave chase.

"I recognize the configuration of the structure," Akksul said. "The Moshae took us to study a place like that… but that place was completely dead, not even the pillars worked."

Ryder frowned. "That's unusual… even the most abandoned and broken Remnant sites I've seen so far have had some life in them, if nothing more than the glowing pillars. Was that ruin you saw spaced out like this?"

Akksul nodded. "It was partially flooded, we couldn't map the whole thing, but like this place it had nothing in them except these… doors in the floor. Most were sealed shut and we couldn't pry them open."

"I've seen some massive machinery, pyramids as far as the eye can see, but everything about that place was angular… everything here seems so much more organic in design," her eyes returned to the broken pillar. "Except everything in this node, of course. Why are they even connected?"

The room they stood in and the two others they had seen so far connected to the same node were as expansive as the ones in the rest of the structure, but that was where similarities ended. The moment they stepped into the node the difference was palpable; they had found gaps in the floor where Ryder assumed those odd lights would normally pop out, except that they weren't functioning, the pillars were either missing or were spaced unevenly, some were taller or shorter, and they even found a lifeless datacore leaning drunkenly at the edge of a precipice where clearly something had smashed through the floor and gaped into a void below, propped up by another broken pillar. Across from that was yet another corridor, but Akksul and Ryder had wordlessly agreed on starting with the easy access corridors first, before facing that dangerous jump.

"Look," Akksul said suddenly, leaning down to study the floor.

Bending, Ryder watched for a few seconds before she realized what she was seeing. "Is the green light fighting the blue light? What does it mean?"

"Perhaps that was the original intention," he frowned.

"You mean the pillar wasn't put there to fill a hole, but the hole opened to break the pillar?"

Akksul nodded.

Ryder went back to studying the pillar and its immediate area, trying to rearrange what she saw in light of such a different objective. What he said did make more sense than to think that the ill-fitting, slanted lean of the thing was deliberate and expected to be effective; the gaps around it seemed too large to really prevent something from coming out and there was definitely rubble around the edge of the hole that supported Akksul's theory. Inspecting the pillar more closely and walking around it to find a deep crack in the back of it, she thought it a marvel that the thing worked at all.

"I wish they had gone to the trouble of scribbling down an explanation for everything," Ryder muttered.

"They did," Akksul replied. "We just don't understand it."

"Well, we've scanned it and added it to our database of gibberish, maybe…" she trailed off, not wanting to mention SAM again. She wasn't prepared for Akksul to see how deeply frightened she was for having lost the AI, perhaps permanently. Coming back around and looking at him, she realized with dismay that he sensed her fear anyway, judging by the speculative frown he wore.

"We studied the Remnant for decades without the help of an AI and we managed to piece together enough," he said. "It will take longer, but you do not need it."

Ryder stared at him incredulously. "I… suppose you are right," she managed to say, and Akksul nodded as if that closed the subject. Perhaps the comment was motivated by his self-interest, but she never thought to hear Akksul of all people say anything even remotely comforting or nice to her; unless she was misunderstanding his tone completely. As he continued to study the flickering symbols, Ryder studied him surreptitiously, trying to catch a hint of what went on in his mind.

"We've learned all we can here. Come on, let's make that jump," Akksul said, waving a peremptory hand at her as if he expected her to follow along obediently before striding out of the room, obviously confident that she would follow; but then, she didn't really have any reason to object, so she did follow, rolling her eyes at his back.

Back at the node, Ryder shot a bullet into the corner as she had done at every room to mark that they had been there, though she thought at least where this node was concerned, there was no need. Taking a deep breath, she approached the precipice and tried to position herself at the point where the two ledges were the closest, but she couldn't help but peer down. It was pitch black and there was no way to tell what was down there and she started to feel like the blackness was trying to suck her down, so she raised her eyes and forced herself to keep them there.

"Ready?" she glanced at Akksul.

He gave her a half-smile that wasn't quite derisive. "Would you prefer I go first?"

In answer, Ryder backed up a few paces and ran to the edge, jumping and firing her jetpack at the last possible moment. In the air she reflexively glanced down again and glimpsed a flash of something, but she couldn't make heads or tails of it, and a split second later she was rolling to her feet on the other side. Proud of how perfectly that had gone, she turned to give Akksul a pointed look, but he was already in the air after her; his eyes also flicked down for an instant, but she wasn't sure he saw anything, and as he, too, rolled to his feet he came up right beside her.

"Did you see it?" she asked in a carefully controlled voice.

He was standing very close, towering over her, but didn't seem to be bothered by the fact; he merely studied her face curiously for a moment, though whether it was deliberate or simply taking advantage of the situation, she couldn't tell. For the first time since meeting him she truly registered just how tall he was, as well as the permanent, grim tightness in his angular jaw. She would have said that was the stress of their current situation, except she had seen it when they had met before, though she hadn't really thought about it as being significant until now. In her mind she went back to the moment he had tried to reason with Zivrel; that had been the first time she had seen him since he and Jaal had faced off at the Forge and even then she was certain that a deep pain that had hardened around him was cracking, but also she was certain that he was trying to control it in a very un-angaran way.

"A flash," Akksul said finally, frowning, then stepped past her down the corridor. "Come on, we don't have time to waste."

"We've got nothing but time," Ryder said dryly under her breath, but she didn't feel particularly interested in arguing the point; she was more than a little preoccupied with the moment that had just passed between them.

It was a little ridiculous, but since being trapped and forced into an uneasy alliance with the former Roekaar leader, Ryder had been discovering sides of him she had never even suspected the man had; worse, she found those aspects of him fascinating… she found him fascinating, which was something she knew she would come to regret. After all, she knew who he was and what his views were; it was an inescapable conclusion that her curiosity was very likely to get her burned, badly, yet she couldn't help but dwell on it anyway. It was a professional curiosity on the most part, of course; abrasive and arrogant he may be, Akksul was definitely proving himself to also be both intelligent and insightful. Though, she had to admit that part of what made him so compelling was the complexity and determination in his ashen eyes, especially up close.

"A console!" Akksul exclaimed, taking the last few steps to the archway at a quicker pace, barely bothering to make sure the coast was clear before striding in.

Ryder bit back a curse, hoping he wasn't going to repeat the reckless stunts he had pulled in the beginning, but as she entered behind him with weapon ready, she couldn't help but be as distracted by what they found as he was. Rubble crunched under her feet and looking around revealed an absolute mess of stones and pieces of pillars; the room was almost completely dark, only the silvery glow of the ferrofluid and a single light by the console providing any real illumination. She walked around slowly, noticing in the back of the room behind where the dais should have been there were large cracks in the floor, as if colossal forces had clashed here and both sides had failed to gain the upper hand. The remains of the pillars around the sides reached upwards like jagged teeth to a darkness that was almost tangible it was so oppressive, but what drew her to a halt was a familiar piece of RemTech machinery.

"Akksul… I think we can make an Observer," Ryder said wonderingly, stepping closer to examine the apparatus. It appeared undamaged, though it clearly had no power. "Does the console work?" she asked, looking over her shoulder.

"I am not sure I can make the interface work," he said, mouth twisting. Clearly he had already tried and failed.

Ryder hesitated. "I can try," she said reluctantly, joining him. He wordlessly stepped aside to give her access, though by his expression he was sore about not being able to do it himself; or perhaps because he regretted displaying a lack in front of her. It wouldn't have been the first time; Ryder suspected that he still very much saw her as an enemy, despite the tone of scientific understanding they had found.

Focusing, Ryder extended her hand over the console and concentrated. She tried to do the same thing she had done at the gravity well, but this time she felt a distinct lack that she hadn't before; she suspected that she was sensing SAM, or rather, his absence. Determinedly she poured all her effort into bringing the console to life and to her shock, a flickering tower of symbols began to materialize above it. She had no notion of what had gone right this time, but it had definite consequences; her head was beginning to pulse with pain and her hand trembled with fire that was shooting up her arm from her fingertips, but she persisted. She tried to direct the energy to create a friendly Observer, but it felt like bending her mind around something much too large to comprehend.

"Remarkable!" Akksul breathed, eyes rapidly taking in the symbols, reaching out as if to touch them. "Yes, this is the same pattern… I've never seen it preserved in such detail, we only ever found fragments, but I'm sure this is the same inscription. If I could compare this to what we found before, when…" his words trailed off. "Well, it doesn't matter now."

Ryder pulled her hand back and sucked in deep breaths to slow her racing pulse. Dizzying black spots swam in her eyes and her body felt drained, but at least the burning sensation had subsided to a mere tingle, though the headache persisted. When she straightened, to her surprise she saw that the console remained active, though the symbols had faded away. At first she thought Akksul was waiting for her to continue, but she realized he was preoccupied with something else that clearly troubled him.

"Did you see enough?" she asked, still a little short of breath.

"Yes," he answered, frowning at her as though trying to figure her out, but brought to the subject, his face changed to reflect a sense of wonder as he pondered what he had seen. "I have definitely seen that pattern of symbols, but not in this order. We have no language to compare any of it to, but if I can remember every place I've seen it, perhaps everything that was around it, I could extrapolate…"

Ryder suppressed a smile. "Does any of that help us now?" she interjected gently.

"Not immediately, no," Akksul said, eyes returning to where the symbols had been. "But considering what we have seen down here, I would say it has to do with keeping things under control."

"What makes you say that?" Ryder frowned, but it dawned on her. "Wait. If this part of the building was damaged, that would explain why the other rooms just keep spewing bots… did you see any regular Remnant structures around the dead one you found?"

"One," Akksul said. "It was the chamber above it, the only thing that was functional down there was the gravity well."

"So, maybe the Jardaan were experimenting with something down here, this node would have been the brain of the place, the control center…" she walked around, but she stumbled a little, still weak from using the console. To her surprise Akksul made a move as if to catch her, but he held back, instead crossing his arms. Perhaps she had mistaken the move; she continued. "There has to be something here that could stop the bots, maybe it could clear a path for us, let us go even deeper."

"You aren't strong enough for that," Akksul said.

"But maybe you are," Ryder said. "I activated it, but I've seen you interface. It might not be nearly as strong as what SAM and I have done, but it might be enough." Akksul grimaced in response, probably offended at her comparison to his detriment, as he must have seen it, but he nodded all the same and stretched his hand over the console.

Abruptly the apparatus came to life and an Observer materialized before their eyes; Akksul looked as stunned as she was, but they had little time to worry over what had gone wrong. The Observer began to quiver and toss about in the air, laser firing in seemingly aimless directions, leaving swathes of destruction in its wake. Ryder's eyes went to the apparatus and she realized with horror that it was pulsing with a blue that seemed to crystallize over the entire machine, not just the lights; worse, it was creating more Observers.

"It's infected! Shut it down!" Ryder called, ducking as the laser burned a streak right over her head. She shot at the bot, but it kept jerking from side to side, quivering before its laser fired again. She clipped one finally and it spiraled into a keening heap of smoking circuitry, but by now there were several more, all behaving as erratically as the first.

"I'm trying!" Akksul retorted, hand outstretched.

Ryder rolled to the other side of him, aimed and brought down another one, but just then the third sent a wave of destruction straight at Akksul. "Look out!" she cried, but it was too late.

With a painful cry, Akksul went down, clutching his leg. Blood poured from the wound, though thankfully it had only hit it on the side; Ryder shuddered as she imagined how much worse it could have been. She dodged over to him and grabbed an arm, trying to help him to his feet so they could get out of the room and abandon their attempt at stopping the process, shooting over her shoulder at the bots whenever she could, but just then another laser hit the cracked section of the flooring and with a loud rumble the floor began to cave.

"Come on!" Ryder yelled, but Akksul shoved her away angrily, scrambling to his feet and hobbling out on his own. Ryder wasted no time and ran after him, quickly overtaking him and making the leap across the chasm at the end of the corridor before turning to wait for him.

"Go on!" Akksul growled at her as he reached the ledge mere moments after she jumped, almost losing his balance as the floor began to vibrate even harder.

"Jump!" Ryder called to him, gesturing him forward.

With a grimace, Akksul jumped, awkwardly because of his injured leg – and Ryder knew instantly he would miss the edge. With a curse of alarm Ryder shoved the datacore into the abyss, went flat on her stomach and gripping hard on the fragment of a pillar the datacore had been leaning against she caught his arm just before he plunged to his death. Groaning with effort as his weight jerked her downward, Ryder put all of her strength behind just holding on and somehow she managed to do it long enough for him to scramble over the lip of the chasm and go sprawling next to her. To Ryder's immense relief, the tremors began to abate and nothing seemed to be following them; good thing, too, because at that moment she was sure she couldn't move to save her life.

"How bad is it?" Ryder asked after a long moment, rolling to her side and wincing with pain. She thought she just might have dislocated her shoulder from catching him.

"Leave it be," Akksul snarled as she sat up and tried to move closer to examine the wound.

"Don't be an idiot, you need my help," Ryder glared at him.

"I don't need anyone's help!" he retorted, but the agony was plain on his face. So was something else, but Ryder couldn't quite point to what it was.

"Akksul, we need to get out of here! I'm not going to hurt you, just let me help," she made a move towards him again and stopped short when he pointed his weapon at her.

"Keep your distance, human," he said, gritting his teeth and clutching at his leg with his other hand. Blue blood trickled between his fingers and slowly began to pool beneath him.

"This again?" Ryder asked angrily, ignoring the weapon and locking eyes with him. "I thought we were past that nonsense!"

"I'm not letting any alien touch me, especially not now," he said, but his hand trembled slightly.

"Why do you hate all aliens so much?" Ryder demanded. She knew the answer, but she was tired of constantly having to fight with him in the most ridiculous situations.

"Because the kett took who I was and broke it, I am what aliens made me," he snarled, then abruptly realized he may have said too much. With a growl of frustration hurled his weapon down and gave himself over to the pain, clutching his leg with both hands.

"Akksul," Ryder said gently. "I'm not kett. Besides which, you and I had an agreement, are you telling me you're not honoring it?"

Akksul sneered for a moment. "You're not baiting me into cooperating with you," he said, glaring at her.

"Damn you, this whole place could come down on us at any moment!"

As if responding to her words, tremors spread through the building again, making bits of rubble jump and topple down into the chasm, but this time it wasn't a collapse, Ryder was sure; it was as if something had brought the whole place truly alive for the first time and even as they watched, the light in the pillars intensified, that same blue spreading like frost enveloping the pillars and walls and then they all went dark in a wave that rippled from the connecting corridor to the previous node all the way to the opposite end where the chasm was; abruptly, the tremors stopped, leaving behind dead silence.

"Are you willing to cooperate now?" Ryder asked, staring blindly where she remembered Akksul being. She fumbled at the light fixed to her armor and turned it on; its automatic function had gone when SAM had, but thankfully it still worked.

Akksul winced in the sudden light, eyes glowing softly, but he nodded sourly and let her apply medigel on the wound. It would at least stop the bleeding long enough to get him back, or so she hoped. Once finished, she clambered to her feet and wordlessly extended a hand to him, which he accepted to with reluctance and before he could protest, she swung his arm around her shoulder and dragged him out of the room as quickly as she could. Being that near a precipice when the whole place kept shaking on and off as if it was about to come apart unsettled her, and for once, Akksul did not try to hinder her. Once they reached the next node, however, she slowed, trying to make out the two bullet holes she had left at the archway which would lead them back to the first chamber.

"That one," Akksul nodded at a corridor to their right.

"Are you sure?" Ryder asked dubiously. They all looked the same to her.

"I wouldn't say 'that one' if I wasn't sure," he replied in a tight voice. Ryder wasn't sure if his tone was from the pain or because of her doubt, but either way she decided to just let it drop. The man would stop being irritating a day after he was dead, she was convinced; although, she found to her surprise that at the moment she felt oddly satisfied more than anything else. If only he was this compliant other times.

"What do you make of those Observers?" Ryder asked after a moment.

"The blue stuff seems natural in other chambers," Akksul said immediately.

"But it was clearly attacking – infecting – the regular Remnant bots," Ryder finished, nodding. "I think this place was built by an enemy of the Remnant… or the Jardaan specifically."

"One who had the same technology… but also one who probably didn't win against these Jardaan."

Ryder smiled. "You believe me about them now?"

"Hardly," Akksul said, but then he hesitated. "Still, it would be careless of me to dismiss it outright."

"Good enough for me," Ryder said.

After what took an agonizingly long time, the pair finally reached the gravity well again and Ryder heaved a sigh of relief. Akksul pulled away from her immediately and she let him go, but hovered nearby as he hobbled towards the containers in the center of the room. She thought maybe there was something wrong when abruptly he froze, gripping one of the containers with a bloodstained hand to steady himself, his eyes filled with a sudden anguish.

"No," he said softly.

Ryder closed the distance between them and followed his gaze anxiously and gasped. "The gravity well! It's…" she exclaimed.

The console was completely dark, just like the rest of the building.

"We're trapped," Akksul snarled.