tīhema baker
taonga
Divers, they’re called. I used to think there was something, I dunno, impressive about them. Going back to the Homeworld, dropping down into the ruins, tryna find lost treasure and all that. Sounded kinda exciting, I guess. Something to get the blood pumping again.
S’not why I signed up, though. Word was that the Dominion pays a shitloada stock for whatever you can bring back. Didn’t know what anyone would want with pre-exodus tech but it musta been worth something to someone. Figured that was my way out. Make enough stock to pack up, head out somewhere in Perseus, maybe start me a nice hydro-farm. Or a satellite mine, even. Make an honest living, you know? Just needed that big break. Something to get me there.
Probably shoulda guessed there was more to it than just treasure-hunting when I sailed through the application process. Half-expected I’d have to reapply with an altered profile – even had a guy lined up to make the changes. Didn’t need it. Application came back clear within a week. Next thing I know, I’m being shipped out to the Dominion Outpost at Luna.
I’d never seen the Homeworld before. Can you believe that? Forty Sol cycles and never even done a fly-by. Never had the chance I s’pose. Mosta my deployments took me way out – I’m talkin’ as far as the Fingers. Some of my Commanders had been there. First-Gen, you know? They still remember it. ‘The Blue Planet’, they called it. Ain’t nothing blue about it. Brown as shit.
That was probably the next sign that Diving wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It was hard to imagine anything worth selling down there, which is why, I s’pose, Luna’s just one big flea market. Cheap, probably contaminated junk, everywhere you look. I’d barely taken two steps off the shuttle when a buncha bots swarmed me, tryna peddle whatever crap their owners claimed the Divers had brought back. Made me wonder: if the Dominion pays so much for this stuff, then why’s it being flogged off out here for a bitta stock, or a few chems and a fuck-buck or two?
Something didn’t seem right about it. Especially once I got past all the bots and finally made it to the Outpost. This thing is built like a Dreadnaught – Kahazite plating behind VKB shielding tech. Coupla anti-orbital particle cannons for good measure. Real toppa the line shit. Not to mention the juiced-up Levigators standing guard outside. Hadn’t seen one of them since the Aquilan Collapse. Meant the Dominion weren’t fuckin’ around out here.
Thankfully, my profile already got the tick, so those Levigators let me in without a second look. It’s a typical Dominion wankfest inside – fulla suited-up dommies, all circle-jerkin’ to the latest numbers rolling across the Propagation Panels. Which are everywhere, mind you – can’t blink without the latest stats on thorium stores or the Subjugation ratio being rammed down your throat. I manage to find the dommie responsible for new Divers and he points me at what looks like a chem-bar on the far side of the hall.
‘You’ll find your Squad Leader in there,’ he says to me. ‘Flick your profile to the vendor. They’ll tell you who you’re looking for.’
By now I’m starting to get cold feet. Looking at all the firepower outside, seems off for the Dominion to be so casual in here.
It’s obviously not the first time the dommie’s had that sort of reaction. He says to me, ‘Look, mate. Divers do their thing and we pay them for it. That’s about as much contact as we’ll ever have or need.’
I got what sort of racket this was, then. Not strictly on the books. Whatever it was Divers really did, the Dominion kept their hands clean of it.
So off I go to the chem-bar. Could see why the dommies avoided it – all the patrons looked like, well, me I guess. In dire need of a shave. And maybe a jacket other than the one they’ve been roughin’ it in for three weeks straight. Just strays who wandered in and the Dominion decided to keep.
I walk up to the vendor and transfer her my profile, just like the dommie said. She barely stops to check it before jerking her head across the room.
‘By the fish,’ she tells me.
There’s an aquarium in one of the walls, and someone sitting at the table in front of it, boots propped up, chem can plugged into her arm, watching the fish swim by. Didn’t know what to expect, but it sure as hell wasn’t her. Most rugged-looking woman I think I ever saw. Biceps bigger than mine, face covered in scars and shit. Had a clan insignia or something lasered into her chin.
She spots me coming and takes her boots off the table. Introduces herself with a name I can’t pronounce or remember – thought it was something from Omega, by the sounds. She must have been used to it, ’coz she rolled her eyes and said, ‘You can call me what the rest of my crew does: Fire.’
That, I could handle. She moves straight on to business.
‘Your profile says you can shoot.’
Not a lot else I’m good for. I said as much. ‘Point me at something and it’s dead.’
She just says, ‘If I wanted another gun, I’d go next door and get one. And if I wanted another brainless goon on the end of it, then I’m already spoiled for choice.’ She leans in, looks me square in the eye. ‘What I need is someone who can watch my back. Who knows what they’re doing. Who isn’t gonna shit themselves when a paracon is honing in.’
I didn’t know what the hell a paracon was but I heard her, loud and clear.
‘I’m your man.’
She just sits back, flags down the vendor for another chem and says, ‘We’ll see.’
*
I was heading out on my first Dive by next rotation. Fire said we might as well get started now she’s got a full squad again. I asked her what happened to the last guy. All she said was, ‘Would I need you if I still had him?’
Don’t get me wrong – all this vague, you-don’t-know-what-you’re-in-for bullshit about Diving was getting to me pretty quick. But I’d served under enough Commanders like her. The ‘don’t ask questions, do as I say, and we’ll make it out of this alive’ type. Decided that served me just fine. So long as I got paid.
Speaking of the squad – well, let’s just say they weren’t the most inspiring bunch. Looked nothing like Fire. Like, if Diving was dangerous, then Fire was the only one who knew it.
Gee was the pilot of the dinky little bloc-runner taking us down to the Homeworld. Big sweaty fella. Looked like he could doze off at any second.
Scope was the scrawny, pimply thing pumpin’ chems the whole way down. Coulda been fresh out of academy, she was that young. ‘Eyes in the sky’ Fire called her. Made sense – looked like she was pingin’ so hard she could see in four dimensions.
Final member of the squad went by Crack. Dodgy-looking guy – showed up late, swaggering in like he’s got the biggest dick in Sol, talking about how he can’t wait to get this Dive done so he can stock back up on fuck-bucks. Took one look at me and said, ‘How much for you? Good with anything beside that gun?’
The gun being a T-9 Hammer. Assault rifle. Probably the only thing worth picking up from the shitty offering the Outpost’s Armory had. They were standard issue when I was coming up. Discontinued now (along with all the mismatched exo-plating the Outpost made me suit up with) but still a reliable piece. Made my first-ever kill with one. Told Crack he’d be my next kill with one if he spoke to me again.
He just laughed in my face and said, ‘They need me more than they need you, love.’
I did wonder about that. The guy was wearing just as much plate as me and Fire, but wasn’t armed. Only thing he had with him was a boxy kinda pack that he swung over his shoulders and clipped to his suit when Fire told us we were almost at the Dive site. My best guess was that he was the one who carried whatever they found back up to Luna for them.
I almost offered to do his job as well as mine but didn’t get the chance – Gee opened up the exit ramp and I got my first look at the Homeworld up close.
Like I said, brown as shit. Could hardly see the ground for all the smog. Seemed to be a few ruins sticking up here and there, but I couldn’t really make them out.
Fire shoves a deployment cable at me. Says, ‘You first. Secure the drop zone, then cover us.’
Easy-peasy. I magnetise my gloves and boots to the cable and step off, Hammer at the ready for as soon as I make landfall.
Except I don’t. Not as soon as I thought, at least. I knew we were high up but damn, that cable just kept spoolin’ and spoolin’ and I just kept going down and down. Smog got so thick I started to wonder if it was all a scam and they’d just dropped me into a gasser. When I finally did feel something solid under my feet, I couldn’t see shit beyond a few metres. Spotlight was useless so I toggled a thermo-lens for my HUD, hoping it would pick anything up before it got close.
Wasn’t the darkness that got me, though. Spent a month pinned down in a crater on a miserable little moon out in the Fingers, once. Tidally-locked so the night never ended. At least that was quiet. Made it easy to hear whenever the enemy was making a move. Down here at the arse-end of the Homeworld was this, I dunno, tone. A sorta constant, high-pitch noise – like the hum you get near a freighter’s fusion core. An engine running. Didn’t seem right for what was s’posed to be a dead planet.
Decided I didn’t really know a thing about the Homeworld and tried not to think about it. Maybe pre-exodus humans were used to it. Maybe it was why they left. Either way, I’d finally set foot on the Homeworld and I could be satisfied I hadn’t missed much.
So, I secure the drop zone as best as I can. Looked like we landed on some sort of transit lane – under a few decades of wear’n’tear the ground’s paved and painted, and there’s these hollowed-out hunks’a metal that I figure are some sort of primitive transport vehicles. In the gloom I can just make out a coupla structures on either side. Plenty of spots for a sniper nest but my HUD ain’t picking anything up. I give the call to the squad.
Fire and Crack make the dive about a minute later. Fire’s on the move almost as soon as she touches down. De-magnetises, draws a fucking PA-2 grade shotgun (don’t ask me where she got one of those) and sets off across the transit lane without a word.
Scope’s already in our ears: ‘Building – south side of the street, third level.’ Fire asks if there’s any movement. Scope says, ‘Few ticks in the area but nothing near you.’
I check my Hammer’s heatsinks just in case and get moving. Doesn’t take long to reach our target – a husk of a building, windows and doors all empty, bits of it crumbling. Almost looked like it would topple over in a light breeze. Scope says we can get in at ground-level, western entrance, so Fire barks at me to take point.
Whatever the place was, I’m thinking, it musta been picked clean already. Reception area by the looks – a busted counter, coupla chairs, just bits and pieces of worthless scrap. There’s a stairwell, according to Scope, east end of ground level. I find it without seeing anything worth taking or shooting, bring us up, and arrive on level three to the same story. Like a carcass with some of the meat still hanging from the bones. Nothing worth the time it takes to scrape ’em clean.
That was until we found the room with the faded sign outside. ‘PUTER LAB’ it said.
‘Jackpot,’ Crack tells me, before Fire gives me the nod and I take us in. It looks completely untouched – rows and rows of tables with identical screens mounted on top, all connected by exposed wiring. There’s a bitta damage by the blown-in windows but everything else is intact. A pre-exodus data library.
While I’m standing there wondering how we’re gonna lug these ancient screens back up to Luna (and how much they’ll sell for), Crack gets to work. Runs to the nearest screen, whips out the box on his back, takes stuff out of it. He’s rippin’ cords out of the screens left-right-and-centre, plugging them into the stuff he pulled out of the box, checking a datapad, all in the space of a few seconds. Then he’s onto the next set of screens, and so on and so on until he says to Fire, ‘Any of these’ll do. Double time?’
‘Do it,’ she says, and before I can figure out what he’s up to, two of the screens are lit up. Crack plugs more shit into one of them then twiddles his fingers all over some kind of input device for the other.
‘Eyes up,’ Fire tells me, motions with her PA-2 to the windows. ‘We don’t have much time.’
I still can’t figure out what Crack is doing, but I follow my orders. Take up a spot by the windows and try to make myself useful by keeping watch. Managed to find the same logo a few times – on old signs, other buildings nearby. The place was a ‘university’. Like a pre-exodus academy, I think. Didn’t know what treasure Fire expected to find in a place like that. Wasn’t like there’d be any pre-exodus weaponry or metal deposits or whatever else I assumed the Dominion was buyin’.
Then Scope reports in: ‘Whoa, Fire. Your building just lit up.’
Finally, I’m thinking, some action. But Fire don’t seem too pleased.
‘What do you mean?’ she says. ‘Didn’t you see them?’
Scope starts babbling, saying she doesn’t know how they got in. Fire cuts her off, ‘Pull it together. Escape route?’
‘There’s a bridge – your floor,’ Scope says. ‘Takes you to the next building over.’
Even Crack seems worried now. He stops twiddling, says to Fire, ‘Scraped about sixty percent. Decent haul, by the looks.’
Fire says, ‘Good. And how many words?’
‘Not so good. ’Bout twenty.’
‘Pull the databank, keep translating.’
Crack unplugs everything from the first screen, stuffs it in his pack, then goes back to tapping at the second one. By this point I’m thinking, translating? What the fuck? But then I hear it: a shout. Back the way we came. Means one of two things – either they’re dumb as shit, or they know they can take us.
I look at Fire. She heard it too. She asks Crack, ‘How many words now?’
‘Twenty-four,’ he says. ‘Must be this string – they’re all coming up with nothing.’
Scope’s back again: ‘Fire, you need to move. They’re coming to you.’
Fire just orders Crack to keep going. ‘Thirty words,’ she says. ‘Thirty and we’re out.’
Something tells me we don’t have time for thirty. I cross the room, go back through the door we came in. Fire’s in my ear – ‘What the fuck are you doing’ – but I don’t care. We ain’t in a position to let them come to us.
I figure the only way to reach us is the same one we took – the stairwell – so I head straight there. It’s dark as fuck – no lighting or windows, so I still have the thermo-lens on – and all I can see are a few bright orange blobs. Heat signatures, two flights down. They’re moving, multiple footsteps on the stairs, and I wonder if it’s another squad of Divers. Gotta be what all the protection is for, right? Competition.
They get clearer the closer they come, and I see a shape I know all too well – a head. My finger’s already on the trigger.
But a hand grabs the muzzle. Fire’s. She’s got one finger pressed to the mouth of her helmet. She points up the stairs with it, starts to climb. Crack’s on her heels, clutching his box. I pull out, fall into line behind them, backing up the stairs one quiet, painstaking step at a time. I can hear the other squad below us, moving quicker than we are, breathing hard. Too hard – ragged, gasping breaths, like they’ve just climbed fifty levels, not three.
Fire stops us on the next landing, her PA-2 trained ahead of her. She gives me a nod that means ‘check on the sitch below’, so I lean out over the railing. Other squad’s made it to the third floor. Look like they’re heading through the doorway we just left. I turn the thermo-lens off to confirm with Fire, and that’s when I see them. Properly, with my own eyes. In the dim light coming through the third-floor doorway.
Not them, I should say. It.
The thing’s gone before I even know what it is. Scope’s voice reaches me – ‘Keep moving’ – and I remember there’s more of ‘em on the way. Fire and Crack are already halfway up the next flight. We only stop when we can’t hear the shrieks anymore.
*
By the time I caught my breath, I’d figured it out. We weren’t diving for treasure. There was nothing left on the Homeworld worth a damn to the Dominion.
Nothing except information.
But that didn’t explain the thing I saw. The paracon.
‘No one really knows exactly what they are,’ Fire tells me when I ask her. ‘Only that, as soon as you’re in the network, they come running. And that you wanna be gone by the time they get there.’
‘How do they know?’
Fire shrugs. Says, ‘They’re not just organic, eh. Blow one open and you’ll see. More wires than guts. It’s what makes them so hard to put down.’
Crack pipes up with, ‘Some say there’s an AI down here. Controlling them. Farming them.’
‘Farming them?’ I say.
‘Makes sense to me,’ he reckons. ‘Not a lot of raw material left to build mobile platforms with. But if you can grow your own bio-matter…’
Still makes me sick to think about. The bodies, all growing out of each other. How quick it crawled up those stairs.
But that gave me all I needed. Probably explained that tone I kept hearing. There’s an engine running alright. A planet-sized one. And whatever’s driving it knew we were there.
‘Listen,’ I say to Fire, ‘I got no problem watching your back down here, so long as I’m getting paid for it.’
She looks at me like I’m crazy. Like I haven’t got her all worked out.
So I ask her, ‘Does the Dominion know about your little side-hustle?’
She doesn’t like that. Tells me, ‘You’ll get your fucken stock.’
I double down. ‘If you’re gonna plug into a network that brings those things after us for something the Dominion ain’t buying, then I wanna know why.’
Fire’s eyeballing me like she wants to take my head off. ‘I said: you’ll get your fucken stock.’
Lucky Scope chose that moment to ring in. Don’t know how that convo woulda ended otherwise.
‘They’re on the move again,’ she says. ‘Headed to you. If you go now, you should make it down the western stairs.’
That’s all we need to know. Plan is to get back to level three, where we can cross the bridge to the next building. We’ll get back to ground from there, find somewhere safe for Gee to pick us up.
It goes without a hitch. We make it down without bumping into anything, about five floors, then we find the bridge – twisted and fulla holes, but still standing. We get across it to the adjacent building, book it across the floor.
Until Fire says, ‘Hold up.’
I look back and she’s on her hands and knees, hauling out cords from under a desk, handing them to Crack, who’s pulling out his gear again.
‘No screen,’ Fire says, holding up a shattered one. Crack says he don’t need it.
And I’m just staring at them like, ‘You’re fucking kidding me.’
‘You want your stock?’ Fire says to me. ’Coz if we call it now we’re not getting paid shit.’ She asks Scope for another escape route.
‘West stairs. Exit to the south.’
‘You go down,’ she orders me. ‘Make sure we got a clear run to that exit.’ She takes out a coupla plasma charges. ‘I’ll be blowing that bridge as soon as I see movement.’
Crack plugs in and I’m gone. Across the floor, down to ground level. Just as I find the exit, I hear the plasma charges go off. Small miracle the whole building didn’t go down. All I’ve gotta do now is keep the way clear.
Then Scope’s back in our ears. Only she’s babbling again.
‘Fire, they’re in the building. Don’t know how. Ground floor.’
Fire loses it. Starts cussing her out over the comms and everything. I got no time to join in. Doesn’t matter now how Scope missed ’em again. They’re right here with me, same floor. Just gotta make sure we can get still get out.
I tell Fire and Crack to wait while I double back to the stairs. Looks all clear, but then I hear them. Howling. Screaming. A hundred screeching voices echoing down the passage. I check my heatsinks one more time. Head towards them.
There’s an opening in the wall. A gap just big enough to squeeze through. An elevator shaft, I realise. I get as close as I’m willing to and switch the thermo-lens back on.
Whole thing shows up orange.
I just start yelling ‘elevator’ over and over. Then it all goes to shit. Fire and Crack are shouting. Scope’s a cot-case. ’Course the whole elevator shaft heard me hollerin’, so now they’re after me too. I turn tail and run, hit the stairs, take ’em four at a time. Get back to level three, round the corner and –
There’s one of ’em. Right there in front of me. Like a woman with bodies falling out of her. All walking on their hands. Or whatever stump they have left. Juddering towards me.
Worst part was the eyes. Seen that look a thousand times. The one that says: kill me please.
So I tried. Lit that bitch up with everything I had.
It comes at me anyway, too many arms flying while I’m filling it with holes. I take out one of the bodies propping it up and it buckles, falls into the wall. They start scrambling – all the bodies – tryna get at me. But the noise – they’re moaning, bawling, like every single one is begging me to put it down. I don’t know if I’m fighting for my life or doing them a kindness. Maybe both. Either way, I just keep firing.
Until my damned Hammer overheats.
I drop back, swapping out heatsinks, and it’s already up again, coming for me, dead limbs just floppin’ around, a hand catches me by the visor, nails scraping across the glass –
Then it’s gone. Fire’s there, spraying buckshot at every inch of fused skin she can see.
‘Roof,’ she says. ‘Get to the roof.’
Crack bolts past me, into the stairwell. I wipe the gunk from my visor, finally get another heatsink in, and together me and Fire paint the wall with this thing.
Turns out she was right, you know. No guts. Not even bones. More like metal frames. Made me think of stick puppets.
But that was just one. There’s more – too many arms clawing their way out of the elevator shafts. So we take off after Crack, up to the roof. A whole freaking building of these things on our tails.
I’ll never forget the sound. The sobbing. As we magnetised to our cables and Gee carried us away. Swear I heard a baby in there somewhere. Crying out to us. Like we were abandoning them. And beneath it all was that tone, buzzing in my skull. The only real life left down there.
*
That was it. My first Dive. One for the books, alright.
Return journey to Luna was quiet. Fire spent the trip with her face buried in one of Crack’s datapads. Scope was a total mess, chemming herself into a coma. Even Crack seemed pretty shook – didn’t say a word the whole way, which was nice. Funny enough, only Gee seemed up for a debrief. First time he spoke two words to me.
‘I reckon they’re moving underground,’ he said. About the paracons. ‘That’s how we missed them. Must be learning. The AI, I mean.’
He was the one who explained to me what was going on with Fire’s side-job. How we would all get a cut of the stock the Dominion paid for the data we retrieved, which Fire would top up out of her own cut for the extra stuff. See, that’s how she kept them doing it for her. How I would ‘get my fucken stock’.
I asked him what it was – the extra stuff. The ‘thirty words’ we almost died for.
‘She don’t say, and I don’t ask,’ he says. ‘Not strictly legal, what she’s doing. So I keep my nose out of it. If the Dominion catches on, then her and Crack are the only ones who know anything. Best gig on Luna, if you ask me.’
He wasn’t wrong. Once we got back to the Outpost and Fire cashed in what we retrieved, my stock went through the roof. More than I’d ever had in my life. And that’s not even counting the bonus Fire sent through out of her own cut.
Then they all just went their separate ways. Job done. Until next time.
I had to know. So I asked Fire straight out. Said I wasn’t gonna tell the dommies anything. That I was happy to keep diving with her, at least for a while. But I just had to know. What could possibly be worth it all.
She pulls out the datapad, hands it to me. It was a lexicon, would you believe it. Screeds and screeds of words, all in a language I’d never seen before, translated.
That was what Fire had been risking her life for. Paying us out of her own pocket for. A fucking dictionary of a dead language.
So I says to her, ‘You selling this once it’s done, or what?’
She shakes her head. I can’t figure it out. I ask her why.
She takes the datapad back. ‘Here – a new word for ya,’ she says. Scrolls down and shows me.
Taonga: treasure, anything prized – applied to anything considered to be of value
I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘When I heard Divers were treasure hunters,’ I said, ‘this ain’t exactly what I expected.’
She just goes, ‘We all value something we can’t sell, eh.’
I laughed at that too. Thought it was a joke. But then she took her little dictionary and left me standing there. Empty-handed. More stock than I knew what to do with, but not a thing in the universe worth caring about. Worth fighting for.
And I thought to myself: she might just be the richest motherfucker on this whole damn moon.
Tīhema Baker (Raukawa te Au ki te Tonga, Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) is a writer and Tiriti o Waitangi-based policy advisor from Ōtaki. He is the author of satirical sci-fi novel Turncoat, which was longlisted for the 2024 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and YA series The Watchers Trilogy. He has also written various essays and short stories published online and in anthologies.