The Backrooms: Pantheon

CHAPTER I

A jagged slab of space debris with dull-glittering veins drifted into the semicircular harvesting bay of Level 78’s space station. Two technicians in bulky EVA suits guided the mass using tethered harpoons, carefully navigating the zero-gravity environment. The bay was a cathedral of cold function—gantries and crane-arms and the great toothed maw of the smelting intake, where starmetal went in glittering and came out as billets stamped with Sol's mark. About forty workers were magnetized to surfaces at angles that would have nauseated a frontrooms engineer. Beyond the portholes, the false stars sang their faint and patient song, and the men had learned not to listen.
Sparks showered from a cutting torch, filling the enclosed space with the harsh scent of burnt copper and scorched plastic. The starmetal came up from the dark in long ribbons, dragged on magnetic tethers through the harvesting bay's outer membrane. Each ribbon glittered with the wrong colors—violets and bruise-greens that didn't belong to any honest ore—and the workers who reeled them in wore gloves three layers thick, because the stuff remembered being part of something larger and resented the cutting.

The observation deck of Iron Fist station “Anvil” hummed with the low, persistent vibration of recycled air pushing through ductwork that predated the Iron Fist's arrival by decades. Maybe centuries. The yellowed, peeling, incongruously domestic wallpaper had been stripped from most of the command module, but patches remained where removal would have compromised structural integrity.
The commander of the station adjusted the collar of his uniform, folding his arms behind his back. The brass plaque on his chest read Robert Johnson. Beneath it, stitched in sharp, crimson thread: The Starslayer. His gaze briefly turned away from the porthole, toward the adjacent observation lab. Inside sat the Cassiopeia Cradle. A low-gravity coffin, soft-lit and echo-dead, lined with magnetar coils and counter-key runes. He had walked its interior once, alone, and felt the way the room ate his thoughts before they finished forming. A good room. A patient room. With it, he intended to prove his title of “Starslayer”. But that would come later. Today, the Cradle was undergoing calibration while the crew focused on the mining operation; the next step in the greater plan.

"Primary tether is snagged on a bulkhead strut, Bob," a technician’s voice crackled over the local comms, his voice distorted by static. "Need a minute to unspool."
Robert’s jaw muscles tightened as he keyed his comms. "It’s Robert," he corrected with an indignant mutter, for the hundredth time. “Robert. The name has two syllables. Try using both.”

"Right, right. Sorry, Bob. Firing the secondary winch."

Somewhere across the bay, somebody laughed.

Robert exhaled sharply through his nose, cutting the channel. He had killed things that called themselves gods. He had braved the choking dark of Level 813 and watched a Highborn unmake itself against runed iron. And yet here stood a bunch of no-name lackeys, probably only measuring up to half his intelligence combined — some of whom picked their teeth with a multitool — having the gall to call him “Bob”.
Idiots, the lot of them. If it weren't for the sheer volume of raw material required by Backrooms Robotics, he would have requested a transfer back to the U.E.C. barracks.

“Commander.” Eluard, his lieutenant, drifted up the gantry rail, hand over hand. “Quota's at sixty-eight percent for the cycle. We'll make it if seven stops fouling.”
“It'll stop fouling,” Robert confidently asserted.
“And the other matter…” Eluard's voice dropped slightly lower, though there was no one near. “Jupiter sent another inquiry about the Cradle. Dr. Hadrian's team is requesting access to the prototype vault. They want to run diagnostics on the Cradle assembly."
"The Cassiopeia Cradle is not cleared for active testing."
"I informed them, sir. Dr. Hadrian was… insistent."
Robert's jaw tightened. Hadrian Voss was brilliant, certainly, but the man had been increasingly erratic since his transfer from Jupiter's theological division. Something about prolonged exposure to paradoxical mathematics. The notes he'd produced on deconvolving Hub-glyphs had been invaluable, but the process had left marks (a polite way to word the fact that he was now, quite literally, a wall). "Tell Jupiter the Cradle only requires some final calibrations, and the field weapons are still field-testing. We'll have a full demonstration package within the cycle." He allowed his lips the smallest curl of a satisfactory grin. “We are very close, Eluard. The lineage shall end by our hands.”

A violent shudder suddenly tore through the station. There had been no alarm to warn anyone, for the things that came aboard had eaten the alarm first.
Throughout the space station, machinery and equipment began failing. Portholes went completely dark. Then the lights flickered down into a tired amber, the color of a tired bulb that has burned for a hundred years, and across every metal surface in the harvesting bay a film of orange bloomed at once, instantaneous, climbing the gantries and the crane-arms and the toothed maw of the intake. Rust. Decades of it, arriving in a single breath.

"Decompression?" Eluard asked aloud, confused. "We're not—the seals are—"

A worker suddenly screamed.

Some would say Robert had a connoisseur's understanding of the great many ways to die. But never had he seen a man's safety harness simply give up—the woven starmetal microfiber granulating, browning, then parting like wet paper, spilling the worker off his magnetized perch into a slow tumble across the bay, swearing, grabbing for handholds that crumbled to powder in his fists before getting sucked into a blip that deposited him directly onto the surface of a distant star.

Robert stumbled, his mag-boots slipping a fraction of an inch across the grated floor. The overhead lumen-strips flickered, flared, and died, plunging the pod bay into the sickly red glow of emergency backups.

"Report!" Robert barked, drawing the Apikorsim bolt pistol from his thigh holster.

The heavy blast doors at the far end of the corridor groaned. The reinforced steel bowed inward, the metal screaming under immense pressure. With a deafening crack, the doors ripped free of their hinges, spinning weightlessly down the zero-gee corridor before smashing into a hydroponics vat. Overgrown, starved roots burst outward in a cloud of dehydrated soil.

Four shapes materialized from shadowy tears in reality, their rusted armor screeching in the vacuum-silence, standing against the dying amber light. Zero-gravity did not to apply to the beings, as they confidently marched across the floor without the assistance of mag-boots.

The first, Shkhan, was tall and lean, draped in a long coat that might once have been any color and was now the uniform brown of oxidation, of decay, of the patient triumph of entropy over every made thing. He moved without urgency. His bare hands were the worst of it—where his fingers brushed the gantry rail, the metal went to flakes and then to nothing, a wake of disintegration trailing behind him like a hem. He led the vanguard, his heavy booted footsteps denting the deck plating. Behind him came three more, their jagged rusted silhouettes moving with purpose, with eyes like dying embers. A broad one, low and wide, who carried a maul of pitted iron and grinned through a beard matted with corrosion—that was Kotal, Robert's reflexes supplied, dredging the name from a Mercury threat dossier. A slight figure who moved in stuttering, insectile flickers, here and then a meter left of here, never quite occupying the space between: Toki. And last, drifting almost gently, a faceless shape wrapped head to foot in browned cloth, who left a smell of old churches and older graves: Hakol.

"Mars actual, we have a breach in Sector Four!" Robert yelled into his comms, leveling his pistol. "Open fire!"

Two security guards un-anchored their boots, pushing off the bulkheads to gain a tactical angle. Their Apikorsim pistols thwipped rapidly, but every shot narrowly missed their targets.

Shkhan didn't even break stride. Toki lunged upward, a massive gauntlet swatting one of the floating guards out of the air. The man slammed back-first into a bank of dead monitors, his spine snapping with a sickening crunch.

“Sound the recall!" Robert barked into the comms, only to be met with static in reply. “Eluard, get me Saturn, get me anyone—”
“Lines are gone, Commander… been gone for several minutes now. They ate the lines.”

Shkhan's head slowly turned, finding Robert on the gantry with eyes that were two points of dull red corrosion. When he spoke, his voice was the sound of a door hinge turning for the first time in one thousand years. “You built a box to hold two children of the firmament,” he rasped, “And you keep it down a hole, behind three doors and a hum. We could feel it from outside. Such a clean thing. So new. So proud of itself.”

“That's Iron Fist property!” Robert stammered defiantly, taking aim with his pistol.

Kotal laughed—a wet, grinding sound.
Shkan advanced closer. "You name yourselves ‘Iron Fist’. You think iron is strength. Iron, like all things, falls to rust in the end.”

Robert fired. The bolt flew true—forty meters of clean killing geometry—and struck, a bone tip carved from a slain Penumbra burying itself in Shkhan's chest. He stopped, briefly, seeming stunned, perhaps even pained by the projectile. Robert’s sense of triumph rapidly dwindled as the bolt suddenly went brown, crumbling out of the wound as flakes of nothing, and the wound closed by forgetting itself.

"Bone," Shkhan murmured with amusement, in the tone of a parent seeing their child’s drawing. “Bone rots too. Rots faster.”

"The vault," Hakol rasped, a voice like grinding parts in a car crash. The Herald pointed a flaking, metallic digit toward the observation lab.

Kotal moved in a blur of oxidized steel, tearing through the reinforced glass of the lab as if it were spun sugar. The vacuum seal ruptured, sucking loose debris and diagnostic cables into the lab. The Sol Finger technicians scrambled, but Kotal merely batted them aside, severing the Cradle's primary power feeds with a rusted blade.

“Whole,” came Kotal’s voice, short and punctual, muffled through grave-cloth. “Sister-coffin. Untouched. It will do.” He rumbled, hauling the massive, multi-ton Cassiopeia Cradle out of the shattered lab. The anti-grav lifters beneath the module groaned under the crude handling, but the Heralds dragged it forward with sheer, brute strength.

"It will do for what?" Robert reached the lower tier, magnetic boots finding purchase on a deck that, mercifully, did not crumble beneath him. “Do you even understand what that thing is? What is does?”

Shkhan descended the last meters and set his ruined boots on the deck before Robert, close enough that Robert could feel the grave-cold of decay radiating from him. "We understand," Shkhan said, “better than you, even. You built a prison, but it can also be a battery; a key…”

“You're insane,” Robert said. “You brutes have no idea what you’re even doing. You’ll just blow yourselves up-”
“Oh, we are not the ones using it. We are merely delivering it to our master…”
As the truth finally dawned upon Robert, his eyes widened with horror. In a desperate bid, he emptied the rest of the Apikorsim onto the heralds. Six bolts, the whole rotary cylinder, point-blank into their chests. Like before, every one of the bolts crumbled to rust and dust.

Behind them, the Cassiopeia Cradle lifted off its moorings, weightless and obedient, Toki's flickering shape shepherding the god-coffin toward the breached intake shaft and the dark beyond. Hakol followed.

Shkhan remained, looming above Robert, staring him down with those dull red eyes. "Do you know what your problem is, Bob?" he asked.

"It's Robert," he snarled, and threw himself sideways toward a pod bay alcove. Toward the EVA harnesses, the EXIT sign, some half-formed plan of sealing himself behind one more door, one more procedure, one more name for safety.
Shkan caught him by the collar of his command coat in one rust-pitted fist. He hauled Robert off his feet, weightless and kicking, and turned, carrying Robert toward the pod bay's primary airlock. The green EXIT sign flickered above the heavy yellow door. “Your problem is that you spent so long deciding what to call yourself, that you forgot what you are…”
Robert clawed at the iron grip crushing his windpipe. “You—you can't—” he choked out, his vision swimming with black spots.

Hakol punched a fist directly into the airlock's control panel, short-circuiting the manual override. The inner door hissed open. Shkhan stepped to the threshold and casually tossed Robert inside. Robert collided with the padded yellow wall, his mag-boots failing to engage. He spun wildly in the weightless chamber, gasping for breath as he reached out. “Wait!”

The inner door slammed shut. The locking mechanisms engaged with a heavy, final clunk.

Through the small observation window, Robert saw Shkhan turn away, joining the others as they hauled the Cassiopeia Cradle toward the breach. The automated warning klaxon blared inside the chamber. The red light flashed.

CYCLING EXTERIOR HATCH.

Robert scrambled in the zero-gravity, his fingers desperately clawing at the manual release lever, but the rusted circuits had already been fused.

For one heartbeat Robert hung in the cramped chamber, alone, hands flat against the cold metal, and through the small porthole he watched the harvesting bay where forty men had worked, where the cranes had pulled glittering ribbons from the dark, where someone had laughed at him not five minutes ago—all of it amber and rust and floating dead now, and the great god-coffin gone into the black, and Shkhan turning at last to follow, the patient hands of time leaving with their prize.

The outer door blew.

The stars rushed in to greet him—singing, the way the men had warned, the chorus he'd never let himself hear—and Robert Johnson, the Starslayer, who had ended the things that called themselves divine and earned a name in the doing, went out into the vacuum with his lungs emptying and his procedures all spent and the false constellations wheeling bright and indifferent around him.

His last thought, absurd, clinging:

It's Robert…

The dark did not care what he was called.