Pax watched Darian from the laboratory entrance as the sun began to set below the horizon. Darian was already in the hut, the moment he lay down on the bed, he immediately drifted into a deep sleep. Even though he was feeling hungry, he had decided to skip dinner to be more alert the following day.
"He'll be away for many days…" whispered Pax, walking outside the hut. Even though his footsteps created a loud metallic sound, Darian couldn't hear it as he was already asleep.
"Guess I'll have to prepare a backpack for him." Pax started to walk towards the greenhouse. After he entered, he first headed towards where the Coranges were being harvested. Pax touched them to feel which ones were better and took some of them. In the room, there was a small basket used by Darian and Ceres; he grabbed it and began taking different Coranges.
"I should put a different type of fruit too…" Pax moved towards one of the most recent crops they were able to harvest: the Velvet-globe. They were fascinating specimens, looking like perfectly spherical ornaments about the size of a large orange. Their skin was covered in a dense, silver fuzz that felt like the most expensive velvet, designed to trap the morning dew. When ripe, as these were, they glowed with a faint amber light from within, making the corner of the greenhouse look like it was filled with tiny lanterns. Darian had discovered that these fruits were packed with electrolytes and a complex sugar that acted like a slow-burn fuel for the human body, essential for a grueling trek through the planet's interior.
Pax grabbed multiple Velvet-globes and slowly put them in the basket. After gathering dozens of fruits, he slowly returned to the laboratory, where luckily Darian had left his backpack, which was currently empty. At the bottom of the backpack, he first put the metallic devices that Darian would need for the exploration of the caves, and then all the fruit. Pax knew that in these caves there was some water that Darian would be able to drink without any problem, but he still packed some water for him.
Pax was able to close the backpack without any trouble, he headed to the front of the hut and left it at the entrance of the house. After that, he headed back into the rocket to turn himself off and recharge.
The following day, the moment Darian woke up, he immediately found the backpack at the entrance and Pax there too. "Oh, you've prepared this for me, Pax?" he asked while checking if everything he needed for his exploration was there.
"Don't worry about that… but you should worry more about the fact that Sonar has already gone into the cave…" Hearing that, Darian immediately widened his eyes and closed the backpack quickly, throwing it over his shoulder. "Why didn't you wake me upppppp!" he shouted, rushing towards the place where Sonar had come from when he returned yesterday. The moment he passed next to the rocket while running, he heard metallic footsteps and Sonar came out of it.
Darian looked at this, confused. He stopped and immediately turned back to Pax. If Pax were a human, he would probably have looked away trying not to laugh, but because he's a robot, he looked at Darian with a serious expression and a thumb up.
"Sir Thorne, wait, you don't even know where the cave is. Wait for me," said Sonar as he immediately walked towards him. "Yeah, yeah…" Darian looked down a bit awkwardly before Sonar positioned himself in front of him. "Follow me." After Sonar started to walk away, Darian first wanted to wave at Pax.
"BYE, PAXX!!" he shouted happily, amused by the joke he had just received. Pax waved back too. "Don't worry, Master, I'll be here waiting for you." With that, Darian walked next to Sonar toward their next destination: the entrance to the cave.
Reaching the cave took around a day. "We're going to another entrance; this one is safer." Darian nodded at Sonar's words as they walked across the purple hills of the planet. By midday, the terrain became different; it was finally more rocky. Darian wasn't used to this much walking; he was currently breathing heavily as both he and Sonar had walked all day.
By sunset, they were finally able to reach a small opening in the side of a cliff. The air coming from there was different; it felt colder.
"Are the caves nearby?" he asked while both him and Sonar entered. "No," Sonar's metallic voice boomed through the cavern. "This is just the beginning, I told you it would be a long journey." As everything around them became darker, the light coming from Sonar's eyes grew brighter, and Darian was able to see more.
The next three days were a journey that Darian would have never expected. They moved through many different tunnels where the walls were slowly becoming slicker and glowing, thanks to the plants attached to the rock.
Darian studied most of these plants, but because these could only grow inside the caves and it was hard for them to survive outside, Darian had never been able to study all of them. Suddenly, they arrived in a larger room that had a river inside it. "Sonar, can I drink this water without any problem?" asked Darian. Sonar, without hesitation, nodded. Darian did not lose any time and immediately knelt down to drink.
Around a day and a half had passed, and Darian was slowly running out of water, so he wanted to preserve it for when they found a source like this. He filled the bottle and drank one last time before getting to his feet again. Before speaking, Darian slowly wiped the water from his mouth. "I'm ready." Sonar, without any hesitation, started to walk again.
Both he and Darian walked in a very long tunnel, the same one with the river, that seemed never-ending. "Hey, are we at least getting closer? Everything here looks the same as… ten steps ago," said Darian, a bit annoyed.
"Don't worry, Sir Thorne; we aren't going in a circle. This cave is just extremely long," answered Sonar with his metallic voice. After two hours, they were finally able to reach the end of the extremely long tunnel.
"We should stop here, Master. After this small space, we aren't going to find any other large rooms in which we can rest," he said. Darian let the backpack fall onto the rock and sat down next to him. Exactly next to him, there was some grass poking out of the rock. Darian played with it with his hands; he had studied this plant around four months ago, but it was very simple. This plant could grow both inside and outside the caves, but only on rock.
As seven hours passed, Darian was able to eat some fruit for dinner while Sonar remained awake, studying other crystals he had found not far from there. Darian, while eating a Corange, was curious to see what Sonar was working on.
"What's this?" he asked while eating the fruit. Without even looking at him, Sonar began to speak. "This is a crystal that I found not far from here; in fact, I took it yesterday while you were asleep." Darian remained curious about it.
"Is it special in any way?" asked Darian. Sonar thought a bit before answering. "For now, I can't tell, but it seems to be very similar to a diamond… but it is weaker." Sonar grabbed another of these crystals from his body, smashed it in his hands, and gave a piece to Darian.
"Hey, it's hot!" he said in surprise, making the crystal fall to the ground. "Exactly, that is why I'm studying it. It's extremely rare to find something this hot naturally… I want to see more of it," said Sonar as he kept inspecting it. Darian looked at the crystal and how Sonar was working, but without realizing it, he slowly closed his eyes and fell asleep.
The following day, they walked for another six hours before the air around them started to change. Everything was becoming colder, and Darian could see some Prism-glass ferns coming out of the rocks. "Hey, we're close, right? I'm seeing crazy values…" Darian had taken the magnetometer from his backpack the moment the air turned colder and saw the Prism-glass ferns on the walls.
"We're close, Sir Thorne, it should be somewhere around here," said Sonar while looking around with his sensor. Soon enough, they were able to reach something totally different from the caves Darian had seen in the past three days.
The cave was a cathedral of light and ice. It was colossal, the ceiling lost in a haze of glowing blue mist. The walls weren't made of stone or rock, they were composed of a translucent, pale blue mineral that looked exactly like ice, though the air was strangely temperate. This was the source. Thousands of Prism-glass ferns grew here in dense, towering forests. Some were twenty feet tall, their razor-sharp blades shimmering like diamonds in a light that seemed to come from the very air itself. They weren't just glowing; they were pulsing in a perfect, synchronized rhythm.
Darian looked again at the magnetometer while his hands were shaking. The values here were crazy; they were higher than anything Darian had ever seen. "My God…" whispered Darian while looking around. He could not believe his eyes.
"I'll wait for you here, Master, let me know whenever you're ready to leave," he said. Darian nodded, amazed by the sight of the cave. He had never seen this many Prism-glass ferns, and the thing that surprised him the most was the height of the plants.
For the next day, Darian lived in what seemed like a fever dream. He barely ate any fruit, as his hunger slowly turned into manic energy. Using his knife, he carefully peeled a section of the massive roots in the cave. He connected the pulse-emitter to these roots, but this time he didn't need to charge them first with a Cryscharge gem. He didn't need to; right now, the magnetic field was already perfect. Darian only needed to conduct his experiments.
As the hours passed, he realized his conclusion from the lab had been an understatement. The plants didn't just communicate; they amplified. They took the low-frequency vibrations of the planet and turned them into a signal that could pierce the atmosphere.
'If this works, we aren't just communicating… we're sending a damn message by shouting at the stars' he thought, before inserting random coordinates for Earth's elliptical path, which he could remember without any problem. Darian wrote the text using Morse code. He thought that if the message was too long, it might never reach Earth, so he wrote something simple: "SEND A SIGN."
Darian slowly moved his finger to the execute command, and what happened next made Darian fall back on his butt. The cave exploded with a blinding sapphire light. The sound was extremely loud; Darian felt like the planet was talking directly to him. For ten seconds, inside the cave, there was a massive light source that went directly into space. Pax, outside, looked at this massive beacon; the moment it went deeper into space, it completely disappeared. Thanks to his sensors, he was able to see that there were some magnetic fields around which were different from the ones he had studied; they contained a message.
"You did it, Master," said Pax, proud of Darian.
Sonar, surprised, entered the cave to see if Darian was doing alright. He was there, his butt pressed against the rock, looking at the empty ceiling. Next to him, the magnetometer was barely receiving any information; it felt as if all the magnetic field in the room was confused. In fact, the plants were slowly losing their primary color.
"It's done…" said Darian, as he couldn't believe what he had just done. "The text is in space; we have nothing else to do."
"But I still don't get it… why the hell would they stop contacting us?" asked Sonar, confused. He hadn't received any information from the humans either, and it felt weird to him.
"As if I'm supposed to know… but I'm sure that they will see our text," said Darian as he slowly moved his gaze towards the Prism-glass ferns, smiling.
"Let's go, Sonar," said Darian, turning his head towards the path where they had come from. "We have finished here."