Chapter Seven

“This is your ‘base’?” Kopaka asked.

It wasn’t much to look at. The room was large, as wide across as the Coliseum stadium. Dominating the chamber was a vast wall of scrap metal welded from the ceiling to the floor, dividing the outer ring from the interior. Large doors sat open, allowing passage in and out of the inner section, but ready to be closed at a moment’s notice.

Outside the barrier were beds and stretchers, where dozens of bodies lay in varying levels of consciousness. Most were lethargic. Some were motionless, simply staring off into the void. What few did speak moaned and wailed, thrashing against crude restraints. On one bed lay a figure they recognized as Botar, but he was horribly disfigured and warped, and when their eyes did meet, they almost seemed to stare right through the Toa.

“Gone!” one Fe-Matoran howled. “Gone! They’re all gone!”

A nearby Turaga hurried over. “They aren’t gone,” he urged, placing scraps of something resembling food in the sickly being’s hand. The hand was unreceptive, however, and the ‘food’ remained unsapped.

“They aren’t coming for us!” the Fe-Matoran shouted. “The Great Beings have left us to die!”

The bodies around him stirred.

“They’re gone,” one muttered.

“It wasn’t enough,” growled another.

“Never! Never!” shrieked a third in response.

All around the original speaker, more and more of the prone bodies added their voices to the hollow chorus, the lamentations now echoing from all around the ring. Meanwhile, a change had overcome the Fe-Matoran, whose thrashing had erupted into an uncontrolled seizure. His eyes shifted from color to color, and his heartlight glowed without beating.

The Turaga did not hesitate, wheeling the victim’s bed past the Toa and their escort, out to an unknown destination in the halls of the star. The Fe-Matoran seemed to go limp and the heartlight went out. But then, to Kopaka’s astonishment, the body stirred and snarled.

Mavrah looked at the Toa, whose eyes were riveted to the receding body.

“Ignore him,” the Onu-Matoran said. “Come on.”

Pohatu looked at Mavrah, then at Kopaka. The lens on the Toa of Ice’s mask whirred as he watched the Turaga shuffle the Fe-Matoran over to an incinerator and dump him inside. In mere moments, the shrieks of the undead Fe-Matoran could be heard no more – and for a few moments after, Kopaka wished he wasn’t wearing a Mask of X-Ray Vision.

“Come on,” Mavrah repeated. “It’s no use lingering out here.”

Like automata, the two Toa Nuva trailed after the Matoran, struggling in vain to process what they had just witnessed.

The interior of the chamber was lined with buildings, all constructed of the same scrap metal constituting the wall. Whatever could be salvaged from the red star had been. The familiar domed homes of Metru Nui were present, but they more closely resembled mounds in a Ta-Metru junkyard.

“He’ll be here shortly,” Mavrah muttered.

As Kopaka surveyed the camp, he could not imagine where the Turaga waited. The encampment was lifeless, and seemingly devoid of any citizens at all.

“Once, every one of these homes had inhabitants,” the Onu-Matoran added, as if reading their thoughts. “Now most of them have progressively regressed into…what you just saw. There are only three of us who haven’t lost our minds, but it will happen eventually…if not today, then tomorrow, or the day after that.”

“Three?” Kopaka asked.

“Pohatu?” came a voice from behind them. “Kopaka?”

The Toa whirled. Standing behind them, arms folded, was someone they hadn’t seen since he’d escorted them off of Odina.

“Guardian!” Pohatu observed. “We’d heard you’d gone south with Tahu. What are you doing up here?”

The Dark Hunter tilted his head. “The same thing as you, I suspect.”

Mavrah stirred. “You know these Toa?”

“I did,” Guardian nodded. He swallowed. “Before… well, you know.”

Pohatu involuntarily shivered, and even Kopaka grimaced.

By now, the Turaga they had seen carrying off the sickly Fe-Matoran had reappeared inside the camp’s fortifications. Now that they got a better look, they saw he wore a noble Kadin and carried a staff with a small launcher on one end. The Turaga had a weathered, worn countenance, beyond even anything they had seen on the faces of the Turaga the Toa had known. He took his place beside Mavrah.

“Toa,” he murmured. “I never thought we’d see any up here.” Seeing their confused expressions, he added, “Not that Toa don’t die often enough, mind you, but the Makuta rarely leave enough of them to salvage.”

Kopaka nodded. “Mavrah filled us in on… everything.”

“Everyone here is dead,” the Turaga smiled humorlessly. “Some who were brought here weren’t conscious of dying in the first place. Others were still haunted by the nightmares of their fates… And now…”

“What happened to you, Turaga?” Kopaka asked.

“I was the Turaga of the Valmai region of the southern continent,” he responded. “Jovan was my name.”

“You’re Turaga Jovan!” Pohatu gasped. “The Matoran told us about you! But… they never mentioned what happened to you.”

“I was killed in what would come to be called the Great Cataclysm,” Jovan nodded. “I saw the stars. I knew what was coming. But right as the bioquake struck, I was killed.” He shook his head. “No good deed…”

There was a tinge of bitterness when he said this, but Pohatu knew better than to inquire further. He could only imagine how Jovan must have felt, being struck down too late to stop the disaster.

The Turaga shook his head, stirring from his reverie.

“Come,” he said, directing the Toa, Mavrah, and Guardian to his residence, the largest of the domes. “Let us talk away from the dying.”

✴        ✴        ✴

“Gaardus,” Jovan murmured under his breath. “I knew of him only in passing. I had thought he had succumbed to the Shriekers.”

“Shriekers?” Pohatu asked.

“The… things out there,” Mavrah gestured. “Their metal parts are always scraping because their organic parts have decayed. And they shriek a lot.”

Jovan looked at the Toa.

“Well, if you aren’t dead,” he said plainly, “then you should pity yourselves all the more for wrongly being trapped up here.”

“There has to be some way off this thing,” Kopaka asserted. “Surely the Great Beings would not have designed—”

“The Great Beings,” Jovan interjected, “as a rule, did not have much in the way of foresight. Wander this place long enough, and you will realize this.”

“It’s illogical,” Kopaka frowned. “Why design a machine that can teleport bodies away, repair them, and then not send them back?”

“That’s the thing,” Mavrah smiled. “It should.”

“That brings me to my next point,” Jovan said, standing. “And your arrival may present an opportunity. Weeks ago, Hydraxon departed on a suicide mission — to fix the outbound teleporter at the heart of the ship. Days later, we sent a search party after him. We never heard back from them — but Hydraxon soon reappeared as you saw him, menacing the halls outside this city.”

The Turaga hesitated.

“As Toa, you are more capable than anyone here. And… it is possible that you may be capable of succeeding where none of the others have.”

Kopaka pondered this. Could he and Pohatu afford the delay when a murderer reigned on Spherus Magna?

As if reading Kopaka’s mind, Pohatu turned to him and said, “We have to. These survivors need our help.”

“As do people on the planet below,” Kopaka muttered. “There is a murderer at large.”

“So we knock a few Screachers down, track down the search party, fix the teleporter, and get back before the murderer gets back to civilization.”

“If Lesovikk does return to the camps on a mount, that should give us a few days. Less if he catches a ride.”

“You really think it was him?,” the Toa of Stone replied.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. We were on his trail when Tren Krom was killed. Gaardus twice said that a howling wind struck him when he saw it happen.”

“He also said he couldn’t see who it was,” Pohatu said.

“Lesovikk?” Jovan interjected, looking between the two Toa.

“Yes,” Pohatu said. “Grim, dark, brooding Toa…not to be confused with my brother here.”

“I know who Lesovikk is,” Jovan assured them, crossing towards the two Toa. “I met him not long after he’d seen his teammates butchered, all those years ago. Reckless? Yes. Blinded by his grief? Yes. But even that Lesovikk would not murder someone in cold blood.” The Turaga’s eyes darkened again. “No, it takes a certain kind of being. Lesovikk would never.”

“Either way,” Pohatu said, “it seems we won’t be getting off this star until we fix that teleporter. So we don’t have much of a choice.”

“True,” Kopaka conceded. “Then tomorrow, we will travel to find the search party.”

“Thank you,” Jovan nodded. “Let us hope there remains something to be found.”