A Pale Dawn

by Chris Kennedy

  The ship looked like nothing Humans had ever designed. Sleek and organic in appearance, it more closely resembled a manta ray. When he’d first gotten his hands on it, Sato had wondered if it was derived from a living thing. There appeared to be no seams in its construction. Then he’d begun examining it from the inside and found plenty of indications of construction. The outer hull had appeared to be manufactured in one piece. The very effort and technique that would take amazed Sato, who knew he’d been given a treat.

  By the time they brought it back to New Warsaw, he’d already taken the shuttle completely apart. The hull had turned out to be made from three parts, not one. The engineering was incredibly elegant. Sato also found tantalizing hints of what the owners must have looked like from the shape of the seats, control interface designs, and the atmosphere. There was zero doubt; the owners weren’t Human. Of course, he’d already known that.

  It was unlike anything manufactured in the Union, either currently or in the past. Some of the internal components defied understanding as well. Sato had organized them into three categories. The first was recognizable technology. This included the lighting, air lock designs, and the basic nature of the controls. Second was technology whose function Sato understood, but he wasn’t sure why it was made differently. Those items were the propulsion system, life support, and sensors. Third, and last, were things he had no clue about.

  In the time he’d worked on the shuttle, he’d just about finished his write-ups on the second category items. He was certain they were the result of adaptation to the strange environment of 2nd level hyperspace. Propulsion was made to work in the contrariness of how gravity and inertia worked there, furthering the theory the shuttle was native to there. He made notes to upload a new maneuvering bios to all Hussars ships for the next time they were there; flying around wouldn’t be a problem anymore. The sensors were a similar situation, though he was still tweaking his understanding of that. The exact methodology still eluded him.

  The unknown items were what inevitably drew his attention. His very nature was offended by a technology which defied his understanding. He was driven to continue pushing until he figured it out. Two items from the shuttle were the worst. One was shielding, which was not unlike the all-but-ubiquitous technology in the Galactic Union. Only it didn’t work in normal space.

  He put a lot of time into that, going as far as to employ his miniature vacuum chamber for bench testing prototypes. You had to be careful with shields in an atmosphere; they tended to have catastrophic reactions against high barometric differences created from simple movements. Which was the reason there were no planetside shields, of course.

  He fitted the strange shield technology onto a tiny ship in what he called his space tunnel, a play on the term wind tunnel. Using sensors, he watched as he tried to make the unusual tech produce a shield. A zone of augmented nuclear strong force should have formed around the test vehicle. He observed it trying to do just that, except it would only form a tiny fraction of a shield and then the zone of targeted strong force would collapse.

  “So frustrating,” he said, returning to his space tunnel for the first time since he had his ride on the Keesius. Whoever moved his lab had also moved the space tunnel. He was doubtful they had any idea what it was. There were probably a great many things in the lab that confused the average being. That gave him a little smile. Sato did enjoy being smart. Then he frowned. “Why won’t you work?” he asked the inanimate object, which, of course, didn’t answer him.

  Sato ran another test sequence. As it had weeks ago, it failed in exactly the same way. He scowled as the slate attached to the space tunnel displayed the test run. He sat down on one of the dozen stools scattered around the lab and stared at the tunnel. Being away so long gave him some new perspective. “Maybe a different approach?” he said.

  He pressurized the space tunnel and took out the shuttle model. Shield tech didn’t scale perfectly for a smaller size like the one-meter long model, although it worked well enough. He’d built this model the same as the ones for the new generation battlecruiser, a model of which was on a shelf nearby, so he took that out and examined it. That battlecruiser model was covered in twenty-two emitters. Being methodical, Sato covered the test model with the same numbers of emitters, then used copies of the alien shield generator design.

  Sato looked from one model to the other. He knew the battlecruiser model’s shields worked, so why was the fundamental theory behind these new shields not working? The math was…strange, sure. However, it should have produced a nuclear strong field. It was like using two calculations to arrive at the same solution. So, it should work, right?

  He put the battlecruiser model back and returned to the new test model. “If one emitter works, that’s a start?” he said. Sato opened the model and disconnected all but one of the emitters, then put it back in the tunnel and let the pumps depressurize it. He confirmed a near-perfect vacuum then ran another test sequence. It should have produced a less than perfect field, weak and unreliable, but a field, nonetheless.

  A field formed and stayed. “Yes!” He nodded. Then the sensor data showed a strange warping, followed by a zone of nothing. “What the fuck is that?” he said. The sensors had registered a shield, only, it wasn’t a shield. He moved his sensor probe to the side of the tunnel where the sole emitter was still connected and got more nothing. Several other sensor modules started sounding off all over the lab. It was as though the shield was reflecting his attempts to scan it. “What the fuck?” he said again. Sato moved the sensor probe to the other side. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  “That isn’t possible,” he said, and shut everything down. He pressurized the tunnel, removed the model, reconnected all the emitters, depressurized the tunnel, and ran the sequence again. Results returned to the same as what he got originally. A nuclear strong force zone tried to establish and promptly failed. He ran it three more times before screaming in frustration and giving up.

  Trying to clear his mind of the frustrating results, Sato left the 2nd level hyperspace shuttle behind. There was another mystery apparatus, but after being stymied so thoroughly, he had no intention of potentially subjecting himself to failure again.

  He went over to the small manufactory in his lab and checked on another project. The machine had been dutifully making one part after another in a programmed sequence for weeks. Full-scale manufactories possessed hundreds of machines once called 3D printers. That was an oversimplification of what a manufactory could do. His miniature manufactory would have been more recognizable as a 3D printer in the previous century, albeit coupled with several robotic manipulators and large rack of raw material supply bins.

  He examined the orderly bins of manufactured parts and nodded in satisfaction. This, at least, had gone well in his absence. He used his pinplants to pull up the schematics brought back from New Persia and smiled. This would be satisfying after the previous hours of frustration. Sato set about assembling the prototype Mk 9 CASPer, the product of untold thousands of hours of design work by Binnig Industries on Earth.

  He slept for a couple hours after getting the prototype started; he was worried something was wrong. He woke up with the same images running through his mind—dreams of a strange spaceship’s interior. Already frustrated because his sleep didn’t leave him refreshed like it should have, he went back to the prototype and picked up where he’d left off. As his midday mealtime arrived, Sato had confirmed it, something was wrong. The prototype Mk 9 wasn’t going together correctly.

  He possessed extensive knowledge of CASPer design. In order to rework his personal Mk 7, he’d gone through every design iteration, all the way back to the Mk 2. Binnig’s engineers were not incredibly innovative; they seemed to prefer incremental, practiced, and economically profitable improvements. When he’d first seen the summary of the Mk 9, he’d been impressed. Here was a true leap forward. It was almost half the bulk of the Mk 8 while being nearly as protective, three times as fast, and able to mount consider
able firepower. It would have been revolutionary. The original Four Horsemen’s dream, given life. A quantum leap forward. Except the half-built prototype in his lab was none of that. It was, simply put, junk.

  Sato stopped his assembly and went back to the files from New Persia. Petabytes of designs, page after page of individual parts, electronics, and specifications—everything needed to build the most advanced powered armor ever built. Every single part a new design, the culmination of a century of design innovation. Only, it wasn’t. Something was deeply wrong with the files themselves. He began to look at the underlying code of the files. The encryption that produced each of the thousands of designs and specifications that would be fed into a manufactory in order to make the CASPer.

  As his dinnertime approached, the conclusion was unavoidable. The files were corrupted at the base code. The encryption should have made that impossible. The encoding process used was Union standard, timeless, completely reliable. It was like standing on a planet and tossing a ball in the air, it would land back in your hand every time, as expected. It could not fail. Only here was a file which was corrupted by the incorruptible.

  Sato looked back at the prototype—physical proof that the file was corrupted. It had to be. A single part with an engineering problem or error was possible. But in this case, every single part was wrong—some of them fundamentally. He was relatively certain some of the parts were not even part of the Mk 9, but from an earlier model, or simply not part of the suit at all. He took one of them and ran a search on it. It was a Binnig part. From a 75-year-old Type 89 Industrial Loader. Other parts were obviously meant for the Mk 9 CASPer, but the measurements and details were wrong by mere micrometers, as if they’d been done sloppily. Or were purposefully wrong.

  He looked at the checksums on the file’s encryption. They were perfect. It was impossible. It was so reliable—if there was a problem in transmission, the program would have immediately realized it and retransmitted that part. Yet, here it was, corrupted.

  “I can’t fix it, either,” he admitted. A couple parts, sure. But this was screwed up so systematically it would require almost as much work to reproduce it as had gone into the original design. It was a seriously effective corruption job.

  Well done, Proctor.

  “Who said that?” he asked, jumping off the stool and looking around. The voice had been right over his shoulder, as if the speaker had been standing behind him.

  Acquire, corrupt, destroy.

  Sato spun in a circle, looking about frantically for the speaker, but found nobody. He looked back at the slate. It was projecting the display of the checksums and data signatures from Binnig of the Mk 9 design files. In that second, he knew. He knew how it had been done.

  “Oh,” he said, and sat back down. “Oh my.” The lab was quiet except for various machines running, doing their designed jobs. “Now what do I do?”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Ten

  One Kilometer West of Manaus, Main Continent, Chislaa

  “There it is,” Fentayl said. “Home.” She pointed to a thicket of large trees. The stand of trees was a circle nearly thirty meters in diameter, with each individual tree nearly ten meters in diameter. They appeared to have been planted close together when they were smaller, but they had grown together to present an almost solid surface.

  “Oh,” Sansar said, disappointment heavy in her voice.

  “What?” the leader asked, obviously picking up on her emotion.

  “I’m sorry, but I expected something…else. I don’t know…I guess I hoped you had a secret entrance to the tunnels…something that could help us…something…more.”

  The three Minchantaa began laughing. “You think the trees are our home? Why would we want to live in trees?”

  “You must leave your shells here,” Fentayl said when she stopped laughing. “Although there is room below, my people will be frightened of you in them.” She waved to Sansar. “You must come out of your shells.”

  “They will be frightened of them without their shells, too,” one of the other Minchantaa noted.

  “Yes,” the leader replied, “but we will make do.”

  Sansar opened her canopy. “Dismount, everyone.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Mun asked on a private circuit.

  “No,” Sansar replied. “But we need their help, or we’re going to have to kill a lot of innocent civilians to capture the city—and a lot of our own troops. It’s a gamble, but I think I trust them.”

  “How about if we leave three of the troops here, geared up, and you, Jacobs, and I go with them?” Mun asked. “That will leave a ready-reaction force here. Not saying we’ll need it, but if we do…”

  “They can come running,” Sansar finished. “Good idea.” She switched to the group net. “Jacobs, you’re with us. The rest of you stay here in your CASPers in case anything happens.”

  Sansar, Mun, and Staff Sergeant Jacobs got out of their suits, causing a reaction from the Minchantaa guards, which was waved off by their leader. They grabbed their laser pistols and went to stand by Fentayl.

  “I never gave you my name,” Sansar said, “but I am Sansar Enkh of the Golden Horde, and these are my warriors Mun and Jacobs.”

  “This ‘Golden Horde,’ is the gods’ messengers?”

  “No, we are not messengers from the gods,” Sansar replied. “Why do you keep calling us that?”

  “Come,” Fentayl said. She led the group around to the other side of the trees, to where several armed Minchantaa guarded the entrance into the interior of the grove.

  As they rounded the last tree, all three Humans drew in a breath—there was one of the giant metal lids, covering a huge opening that led underground…and it was open!

  “You do have one of these open!” Sansar exclaimed. “How did you open it?”

  “We didn’t,” Fentayl replied. “Just wait,” she added, when Sansar started to ask another question. “Wait until you see the grzch. Then you will understand.”

  Fentayl led the group to the opening. The Minchantaa had built up the level of the ground around it, so that the top of the tube was level with the surface. A ramp inside the tube led down at a fairly steep angle until they were almost ten meters below the surface, where it flattened out. The metal ramp had some sort of non-skid material on its surface, allowing them to negotiate it easily. Without the non-skid, it would have made a good slide, especially if wet.

  The underground passage joined what appeared to be the primary passageway at a “T” intersection, where the tunnel extended off to both the left and the right. The walls of the shaft appeared to be the same material as the ramp had been and were ten meters wide, with a ceiling five meters high. Bundles of wires and conduits ran along the ceiling.

  “What is this place?” Jacobs asked.

  “No idea,” Sansar replied. “But I see why that lid is still up.” She pointed to a control pad on the wall. Not only did it appear dead, there were scorch marks above it on the wall and ceiling. “Looks like the controls must have burned out at some point. They may have tried to put this one up, too, but couldn’t.”

  “Who?” Jacobs asked.

  “I don’t know…yet.”

  “I do know one thing,” Mun said. “The Minchantaa didn’t build this; someone else did. It looks old—really old—and they don’t have the technology now to do this. There’s no way they could have done it sometime in the past.”

  “Wait until you see the grzch,” Sansar muttered in a whisper. “Then you will understand.”

  Mun and Jacobs chuckled, although somewhat uncomfortably as they proceeded into the darkness, and the walls seemed to press in on them. Sansar wasn’t claustrophobic by nature, but as they walked through the underground tunnel, she realized it wouldn’t take much to make her that way. A single, dim glow strip provided a minimal amount of illumination which, after their eyes adjusted, was just enough to see by.

  There was a decent amount of traffic through the tunnel, with Minchant
aa coming and going in both directions. The ones they saw gave the Humans a wide berth and appeared either scared or angry to see them. Sansar wanted to ask, but figured she’d get the same reply she had gotten earlier.

  After ten minutes’ travel, they came to a small cross passage. It would have been unremarkable—they’d passed many cross passages on their journey—except this one had two armed guards at its mouth. Fentayl waved, and both stepped aside, allowing them access.

  “This is the grzch,” she said. She said it quietly, as if in awe of the place. “Do not touch anything, or we will kill you.”

  Sansar nodded to the alien and stepped into the smaller tunnel. The space—Sansar saw it was not a tunnel, but more of a small room jutting off the main passageway—was about three meters cubed. Having the ceiling close in on her ramped up the claustrophobia. She forgot it immediately, though, when she saw the writing on the walls. Looking closer, she could see it wasn’t writing, but more a series of pictures.

  “These look like cave paintings,” Jacobs said, “only better.”

  “True,” replied Sansar, lost in thought as she tried to decipher them. Rather than waste time, she turned back to Fentayl. “What are we looking at here?” she asked.

  The alien pushed into the room with them, making it a little more crowded, but Sansar was too engrossed to notice. “The grzch is a series of pictures that tells our history of meeting the gods,” Fentayl replied.

  She pointed to the first image, which showed what looked eerily like an ant mound back on Earth. “Once, we lived below ground here, in tunnels of our making. We spent most our time there, because of the merksht.” She pointed to the next panel, where a cluster of Minchantaa with spears fought what looked like a saber-toothed tiger, three times the size of the largest Minchantaa.

  She moved to the next panel. “Then, the messengers of the gods came.” All three drew in a breath. There, on the wall, was an image of a trio of mechs descending from the sky on massive plumes of fire. Sansar had no doubt that, to the Minchantaa, the mecha must have looked like gods. The mecha looked like Raknar, only smaller. Without anything to compare them to, though, it was hard to tell.