Chapter 9: Trash Dungeon
"Gross...I think I stepped in something." said Henri
Walder chuckled.
"Hon, look at this planet. Merely by landing here it was always all but certain that we'd be knee deep in 'you-know-what' by the end of the trip." said Walder.
Henri's stoic lack of expression briefly gave way to a look of disgust before smoothing over to its usual deadpan.
"Gnh...Let's just go shall we?" said Henri.
"Right, right…." said Walder. Using his implant to interface with his suit, and inbuilt the suits harmonic-generators and holographic projects create a solid-light vehicle. The holographic hovercycle taking on mass and interacting with reality as if it were real.
Henri gaped as she gazed at the sleek yet bulky, blue-silver, hoverbike with its wheels replaced with an anti-gravity suspension system. She looked around to see if any of the people in the area was paying the two of them attention and then sighed in relief when she realized that this wasn't the case.
Solid-light powers weren't unheard of in the galaxy by any means, but creating machines that could repeat the phenomenon had escaped scientists for years. The closest they could get was using nanotech to simulate it.
It was at this point that Henrika realized that she could no longer allow her husband to shock her with the things he could do. If she spent all her time gasping at every little thing she'd be exhausted to death by the time they reached the first anniversary.
"What are you waiting for? Get on." said Walder. His words crashing through Henri's train of thought like a mudslide.
"Huh? Oh….sure." said Henri. Realizing that the man had only made one bike. She reasoned that Walder's suit couldn't sustain the creation multiple complex structures and then blushed as she realized that they'd have to share the vehicle for the remainder of the trip.
After a few seconds of drifting pink thoughts, Henri sat behind Walder, and placed her arms around his weight, holding on tight because complex feelings aside, falling out a speeding a hoverbike would definitely not be an enjoyable experience.
The bike was oddly silent, emitting only a faint hum as it carried its two passengers down a road occupied by a mixture of pedestrians, spider-limbed droids, and hovering vehicles.
It wasn't at all an overstatement to say Nabrok was basically a giant planet-sized landfill. In the current age the small percent of trash that wasn't in recycled through some form or means, was tied onto drone controlled rockets and sent flying into distant suns for incineration. Meaning that for the most part junkyards and landfills didn't really exist. Nabrok was one of the few surviving examples.
Nabrok was a trash pile filled with refuse from some unknown, highly advanced, civilization. Sorting through all that trash occasionally would result in finding treasures; the technology and market novelties that had the scientists and venture capitalists sending people down to the planet's surface to see what they could pick up.
Beneath all that trash, lay a network of dilapidated roads that lead to countless abandoned structures. The cities of Nabrok were labyrinths, great necropolises, covered in soot, and grime, and grease.
"Okay, looking at the online maps, and guides, it looks like down 'there' is the main road, and over 'there' leads to the less explored areas…." said Walder. Staring at a holographic display that floated out from a projector that was hidden somewhere up his coat sleeve.
"Mn….Heh...One road is road more travelled with more safety and less loot...the other road is a road less travelled with more untapped opportunities…."
"Road less travelled it is…" said Walder. Driving down the side path.
"Eh?! Just like that?!...I thought we were still talking this over." said a wide-eyed Henri.
"Meh….Aren't the side paths usually the best route in those online games of yours. Sure it might be harder but there could be more loot, more encounters, secret bosses and all that good stuff.." said Walder.
Henri sighed, rubbing her forehead because her husband non-logic had given her a slight headache.
"That's just in games….Giving up safety for a bigger chance at running in opportunities makes more sense because there are things like respawning and save files you can load from...if we die here, we just stay dead." said Henri.
"Psh...Nothing ventured, nothing gained, H. Where's your spirit of adventure?" said an almost excessively, high-spirited, Walder.
Henri just rolled her eyes, and stopped arguing. She knew that at this point there would be no talking her husband out his foolishness, and beyond that, there was a small part of her that was interested in seeing if her skills had begun rust during her days as a shut-in.
They drove in silence, navigating their way through roads and paths cluttered with trash, rubble, and abandoned vehicles. The fact that the bike was an anti-grav vehicle like most other hovering vehicles of this age, helped with making the journey because getting past a cluster of obstacles just meant hovering a little higher for a while.
They didn't run into anything till half the day had gone buy and they'd travelled several hundred miles into regions of Nabrok that were much less visited than the world's major cities and industrial hubs.
After several hours of riding in silence and shooting the breeze, Henri finally said,
"Neither of us is familiar with this planet as a whole, and I'm not seeing anything that stands out on the horizon, so I'm thinking we should slow down and send out a couple recon-drones instead of just driving aimlessly and hoping to run into anything."
Walder nodded, immediately throttling back the vehicle and slowing the hoverbike till it came to a stop, with two set of halfmoon shaped legs appearing beneath the bike's anti-gravity boosters, to keep the bike upright.
Henri pulled a set of round silver balls from out of a pouch on her utility belt. Then she pulled her tablet computer out of its case and started up the reconnaissance application. All she'd have to do was press a button on the app and those silver balls would sprout propellers and become a small flock of self-piloting drones that could be deployed and sent out to survey the surrounding area.
Ordinarily she would have deployed them immediately, but logic and past experience led her to hold off from doing so.
"So, I'm going send these out...unless of course you have something better." said Henri.
Walder was about to nod, but then he frowned, and pressed a button on his coat sleeve instead. Out from within the hood of his long jacket came a thick, black cloud of dark, silver, dust.
Henri recognized a nanite swarm when she saw one. She'd actually had to write a treatise on the subject. Writing about possible future applications of nanotech that would be implemented once scientists got a better handle on the molecular engineering required for creating even smaller, particle-sized, machines.
She shook her head, and then said,
"Any way you can let me in on your feed?"
Walder reached into his pocket and pulled out a dongle to allow someone without one of his implants to interface with his drone swarm.
The dongle looked more like a piece of putty but after staring at it for a second, Henri figured out that that she could basically just press it onto any of the ports on her tablet and the dongle would morph to the appropriate shape to interface with her device.
A second later she saw a new application rapidly install itself onto her device, and a second after that she found herself looking at top-down view of the city, complete with helpful little icons to mark out things of interest.
"....Handy." said Henri.
The first thing that popped out at her was a cluster diamond shaped, orange-red, enemy icons heading in her and Walder's direction.
"Looks like we've got incoming." said Henri.
Walder just nodded. Smiling faintly as he got off of the bike. Henri followed suit and then the bike disappeared, fading into nothing, as the energies that made it a real object were cut.
Out from behind a half-collapsed building came a small group, of thing. They were misshapen, yet clearly humanoid. Their skin covered in warts, and bumps, and cancerous growths. Their dull eyes were filled with hate, and pain, and hunger. Their bodies were covered in scraps of cloth, and they wore armor that had either been pried off the corpses of their former victims, or had been made with trash and bits of animal hide.
Their weapons were bones, and whatever bits of heavy and/or pointed garbage they could find, and all of it was covered in a foul smelling, likely poisonous substance.
These creatures were trogs. The trogs weren't a species. They were more a state of being. A state of species-wide damnation.
Bigotry and hatred don't go away just because a civilization has advanced technological. Even in homogenous cultures where the entire world is made up of a single species of sentient beings, rather than multiple species, people will divide themselves based on silly things like skin color, ear-pointiness, fang-length, tail-length, number of limbs, number of heads, geographical position, religion, political party, shoe-size, and height.
Trogs were an artifact from the eons that came before the unified Msaran Interstellar Government and its unified races of Humanity came into being. They were a relic from the days when the wars amongst the stars were even bloodier, nastier, and crueler than they were now.
Back in those days such faction based conflicts went too far, or when certain transcendental, extradimensional beings threw their hats into the mix, things could enter a whole new realm of horrifying.
There's more than one way to commit genocide and trogification was one of the worst fates a people could suffer.
The process was so abhorrent that tens of thousands of years ago, the heroes league and the powers-that-be, the defacto 'gods' of the galaxy more or less decided that any group that was so much as suspected of trogifying their enemies would be extinguished in their entirety, with their younger members being condemned into slavery, and kept from any positions of real power, for no less than ten thousand years.
Trogification was a disgusting practice meant to demean, and debase, and demoralize. It was a permanent condition. Incurable. Neither genetic treatments, nor technological intervention, nor time would change a trog back into a something that was more than a twisted caricature of sentient life.
Trogification was the means by which one could turn one's rivals into exactly the weak, stupid, and foul creatures you thought they were. Using means that had been redacted from the anals of history to genetically corrupt a people and warp them into creatures that were primitive, and evil at their core. Turning them into short-lived, inferior beings by design.
Similar to the advanced version of the rage and nemesis viruses that had scurged countless worlds several millennia ago. A trogified being was of low intellect, and low physical capability.
They were mentally deficient weaklings, made ugly on the inside and on the outside. They were creatures programmed only to eat, s***, rape, and destroy everything within reach of their grubby little fingers.
Trogifying one's enemies during a war would lead to the opposing side being destroyed from the inside out. Filling their ranks with dark-minded, dim-witted, creatures that knew only hate and hunger.
Worse yet, trogification ensured that this ignoble caricature of an enemy group would live on for eons. As the one power that all trogs could boast about was their ability to breed and survive in dire circumstances. Whether it was with each other, or captured members of outside groups. Regardless of species, or gender, so long as it breathed, a trog could turn it into a seed bed, and make dozens more of its kind. And trogs didn't seem to need much in the way of resources to get by.
Which changed the trogs from merely being a humanitarian disaster into being a ecological disaster as well.
Trogs were one very big reason dungeon worlds like Nabrok had such strict guidelines for what could land on their surface. One trog taken into space and allowed to run loose on an inhabited world could easily become a whole trog infestation. With the half-breeds being dangerously smart but every inch as loathsome and evil.
Henri pulled an assault rifle out of the storage device at her side and began to fire into the crowd of trogs.
Walder laughed. Slamming his fists together, as his coat morphed into a combat armor, and covered his fists with spike-knuckled, heavily padded, gauntlets.
Henrika kept to the rear, firing careful, staccato bursts, of heavy jacketed rounds into the crowd of trogs. Killing dozens of the creatures each time she pulled the trigger. Walder fought in the vanguard. Tanking the arrows, spears, and knives that the trogs wielded, while he sent the creature's flying with each blow from his fists.
The fight didn't very last very long. Ending within fifteen minutes or so, and leaving the two hunters surrounded by foul smelling corpses. Walder pressed a button on his coat and a pack of metal crabs climbed down from somewhere within his coat, crawling down his coattail. Crawling amongst the corpses, cleaving them open and removing the glowing jewels inside.
Henri watched the harvesting process, and then watched Walder store away all the retrieved prana crystals in his storage device, and then sighed thinking back to her academy days when she'd been forced to do the messy retrieval and dissection work herself..
"....Another handy little doodad." said Henri.
"Yes...quite. Do you want some for yourself?" asked Walder.
Henri thought about it, realizing that from what she knew about Grimwald Cerveny, the man's willingness to let her be privy to his secrets also indicated a willingness to let her share in his resources.
As the former-first daughter of a clan she couldn't help being moved by all the possibilities, but remembering that she was now just herself, representing and working in the interests of only herself, with nothing to do with the Amihan family, the appeal waned to a more normal amount.
"Mhm...Maybe later."
In truth, the threat that the trogs represented as a quick breeding race that was designed to hate all life, and breed quickly, was such that the galactic governments and secretive powers-that-be had often considered a campaign to wipe the creatures out completely.
The only things that stopped them from doing so was the difficulty that would come with such an endeavor since countless races fell trogification, and secondary trogification(annihilation by breeding). As well as the fact that trogs were like all the other "monster" races of the galaxy in that their hostility was counterbalanced by their value as a resource.
The glowing crystals within the hearts, heads, and within the marrow of the larger bones of such monster races were in fact half-responsible for all the bounty and prosperity of the current age.
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