Page 7 of The Inheritance
The cave passage kept branching. Left, left, right, another right, each tunnel glowing with swirls of colorful lichens and fungi. Elena was right, the place was a maze. At least we didn’t have that far to go. I had seen the preliminary survey of the breach, and the mining site was half-a-mile from the entrance, off to the side.
The way was clear, the tunnels were empty, and Bear stayed quiet. Just like any other gate dive. It should’ve felt routine, but it didn’t. I kept expecting some kind of awful shoe to drop.
Ten years ago, when the first set of gates appeared out of nowhere near the major population centers, they’d taken humanity by surprise. We’d cordoned them off so we could carefully study them and before anyone had a chance to adjust, the gates burst, spilling a horde of monsters into the world.
We knew a lot more about the gates now. Beyond every gate lay the breach, a miniature dimension stuffed to the brim with creatures so dangerous, they were biological weapons rather than living beings. That dimension connected Earth and the hostile world like a gangplank linking two ships. The breaches were how the enemy got from their world to ours.
Every breach had an anchor, a core that stabilized it. Once the breach appeared, the anchor began to accumulate energy. When it got enough, the gate would burn through the fabric of our reality and rip open, releasing the monsters into our world to rampage and murder everything they came across. The more dangerous the breach was, the longer it took to burst.
There was a brief period, anywhere from a few days to a few months from the moment the gate appeared, when the monsters couldn’t escape yet, but we could enter the gate from our side. It gave us a chance to extinguish the anchor and collapse the breach. The moment a gate manifested, the clock started ticking.
At first, destroying the anchors was the sole responsibility of the military, but it quickly got prohibitively expensive. Regular humans were no match for the breach beasts, and casualties were high. And it was discovered that the breaches contained a wealth of materials: strange ores, medicinal plants, and monster bones with incredible properties. Resources that could aid our fight and make us stronger. It wasn’t just about destroying the anchors anymore. We had to strip the breach of anything valuable before it collapsed.
Within months after the first Talents manifested their abilities, they banded into guilds, and governments around the world began to outsource gates to them, taking a percentage of the profits. Economic and security crisis solved at the cost of volunteer lives.
By now, the process of gate diving was almost routine. As soon as a gate appeared, it was graded, its threat level measured, a government assessor like me assigned, and the appropriate guild contacted. The guild sent a team in to do a preliminary survey and let the DDC know when they were ready to proceed, at which point I arrived at the site.
The attack began with the assault team, heavy hitters with combat talents, who entered the gate and cut and burned through the miniature pocket dimension until they found the anchor and destroyed it. The journey to the anchor took days, sometimes weeks.
While the assault team worked their way to the anchor, the mining crew came in and stripped the breach bare, extracting anything that could be of use and would help humanity keep fighting. Each breach’s resources were unique and precious. My job was to assess the space, guide the mining team, and make sure that the government got their thirty percent cut.
Once the anchor was destroyed, the assault team would rush back to the exit, because without the anchor, the gate would collapse in three days. Nobody knew what happened to the breaches once the gate closed. Hopefully everybody got out before the gate vanished, and when the next one appeared, we would do it all over again.
Ahead Aaron stopped. Finally. It was time to earn my paycheck. The sooner I found something of value, the sooner we all got out of here.
Apprehension curled around me like a cold snake. I could just turn around and run back to the gate, quit, and never go into any breaches again. I could absolutely do that. But then whatever this breach held would stay in it instead of becoming weapons, armor, and medicine.
I took a deep breath and pushed forward, past the miners, to do my job.
2
A massive cavern spread in front of us, awash in bioluminescence like some bizarre rave. It resembled an enormous egg set on its side, with the wider end to the right ending in a solid wall and the narrow end to the left splitting off into several dark passages. The cavern’s floor sloped to the center where a wide stream ran through the cave from left to right. The water was like glass, perfectly clear.
At the banks, the stream branched into several small pools bordered by rimstone dams, some shallow, others deeper. The pools flowed into each other, stretching toward a flat island on our right. The stream split around it and emptied into a lake, its waters moving slowly and disappearing under a spectacular flowstone wall where layers of calcite formed a frozen stone waterfall.
Melissa turned to London.
The blade warden surveyed the cavern. “Go ahead.”
“I need lights, people!” Melissa called out.
The mining crew spread out, planting floodlights along the nearest wall. The only flat space available was directly by the entrance, and the mining crew managed to fit three out of the four carts on it. The portable generator on the central cart sputtered into life, and bright electric light illuminated the cavern. The sloping floor was ridged with calcite, and it looked slick. A good way to break a leg.
“Much better,” Melissa declared. “It’s almost like we know what we’re doing.”
London nodded to the tank. Aaron moved to the left and planted himself in the narrower part of the cave, between the dark tunnels and the mining crew. London stayed at the entrance, guarding our exit route. The three strikers fanned out along the perimeter.
It was my turn to shine. The cavern walls were awash with swirls of bright green mixed with rust-colored metallic deposits. Promising.
I took a deep breath and flexed.
The official term was talent activation, but to me it felt like flexing a muscle I didn’t normally use. The world turned crystal clear. The edges of the rimstone dams and contours of the flowstone waterfall came into sharp focus, as if I’d adjusted my eyes to a higher resolution. The outlines of individual mineral deposits glowed slightly.
I focused on the closest wall, scanning and evaluating, sorting through different hues. Malachite, copper-rich chalcopyrite, decent but not exciting. Cuprite, quartz, calcite, trash, garbage, junk…
A patch of funky plants to the left glowed with dull, pale pink. Healer Slipper. A weird variant, but definitely in the same ballpark as the more common varieties. If processed, it would yield a potent broad-spectrum antibiotic. A decent haul, if nothing else showed up.
Unlike Melissa, who only sensed ores and only when she was on top of them, I evaluated everything in my environment, organic or inorganic, and my talent tagged it with glowing colors. Red meant something useful, something I needed or wanted. Blue was toxic, yellow was dangerous, and occasionally I would get weird shades like white or brown, which told me nothing.
