by J. N. Chaney
16
Dash couldn’t fault his people for their ingenuity.
In the weeks since he and the others had returned from their trip out into the big black, the Deepers had been silent. There’d been no incursions, no planets threatened for their resources, no attacks whatsoever. The only Deeper activity they’d recorded were brief forays by lone ships. They’d appear on the margins of current Realm space, lurk for a while, and then vanish at the first hint of any pursuit. It all just felt too quiet, to Dash and everyone else.
That didn’t mean that the Realm had been inert. Since the moment Dash saw the Radiant Points adrift in a muck nearly old as the universe, he knew—along with his officers—that the game had changed. Amy and Conover couldn’t fathom something as important as gate tech being left somewhere at the end of space, but Dash, and in particular Viktor, could. Many of his officers understood the Deepers were, in a sense, a navy, and no one was better than the armed forces at putting important things in places where they could be miscounted by an overworked logistics staffer.
“Do the Deepers even count?” Sash asked Sentinel.
“If they do, they’re just incompetent enough to give us the keys to the galaxy.”
“Good point.”
Still, the lull gave them the chance to get to work on what would be the largest and most complex engineering work ever undertaken by humans—construction of the Kingsport.
The problem, though, had been the Backwater Gate. Stuck on the surface of the barren planet, there’d been only one way for any ship not designed for atmospheric flight to make it through—the terrifying dive from orbit that the crews had come to call the Death Plunge. It was, as Benzel observed, like trying to thread a needle, if the thread was traveling at hypersonic speed and embedded in a cloud of incandescent plasma, and one in three people on the bridge was screaming or praying or both. Even then, ships had to pass through only during certain windows of opportunity, when the League laser ships could fire from geosynchronous orbit and thin the atmosphere. Not only did it play hell with Backwater’s climate and environment, but Dash also doubted someone could have made a more inefficient means of travel if they’d set out to try.
Even before he and the others had made their long trek out to the lonely dwarf star, he’d asked Custodian how long it would take to construct the Kingsport, assuming most of their ships had to keep braving the Death Plunge. The answer had been even more discouraging than Dash had expected.
“Considering that only vessels with sufficiently strong shielding can undertake the maneuver, and only when the atmosphere is adequately thinned, and setting aside the significant probability of accidents resulting in damage to ships and—”
“Custodian—just, how long?”
“Approximately two hundred years.”
“Great. Guess I’d better get to work on my will, then, since I’m going to be leaving the next four or five generations of my descendants an incomplete mega-station.”
It was then that the ingenuity of their people kicked in, chewing on the problem. They had to find a way to get the gate into orbit while keeping it intact and operating. The AIs and engineers working on the problem had concluded that the gate should remain stable as long as the cradle containing it remained intact. Still, it meant trying to lift thousands of tons into orbit, a daunting, risky task even with the tech they had available.
But Al’Bijea hadn’t seen it that way.
The leader of the Aquarian Collective was an expert in moving large masses from where they were to where he wanted them to be. Normally, that was comets and asteroids, but he’d taken only a brief look at the Backwater situation, then proclaimed it was by no means an insurmountable problem.
Apparently, he’d been right. Dash and the others had returned from their long trek into intergalactic space to find that the Backwater Gate had already been lifted off the surface and now revolved around the planet in a rock-stable orbit.
Al’Bijea had been dismissive of the barrage of praise aimed his way. “It was a challenge, yes, but as I said, not an insurmountable one. Once the gate’s mechanism had been excavated free of the bedrock, what remained was a problem similar to moving a small asteroidal mass from a region of relatively high gravity, to a considerably lower one. Your—distortion cannons, you call them, I believe? Anyway, they proved absolutely invaluable in making the task possible.” He’d turned to Dash. “By the way, I would like to speak with you about procuring some of those devices. They would make our jobs in the Collective so very much easier.”
“And profitable,” Dash replied, grinning.
Al’Bijea offered a wily look, then smiled broadly. “Perhaps.”
Watching ships beginning to pass sedately through the orbiting gate, Dash had resolved to give Al’Bijea all the distortion cannons he wanted.
Now, standing aboard the construction ship Great Wall, that resolve only firmed up. A few thousand klicks away, the very first components of the Kingsport were in place, the two self-assemblers built aboard the Forge busily turning feedstock—scrap, salvage, and even just rock—into a monumental space station.
Of course, it wasn’t anywhere near monumental yet. All that had been assembled so far amounted to little more than the mass of a heavy cruiser. But it was a start.
“Have to admit, Dash. I’m still a little worried about that thing sitting off our port side. You guys are sure there aren’t any of the damned Deepers lurking aboard it somewhere?” Bercale asked.
Dash turned to the man who headed up the Local Group, the ship-building consortium that now assembled and maintained almost half of the Cygnus Realm’s fleet. It had been the devastating loss in a surprise attack of one of the Local Group’s shipyards, along with nearly three hundred of their people, that had opened the war against the Deepers. Bercale still felt the sting of loss and had become one of the most dedicated foes of the Deepers as a result.
In Bercale, the Deepers created a lifelong enemy. It was a mistake they would learn to regret.
“We’ve swept that Deeper platform from end-to-end, repeatedly. And we have patrols constantly watching its entire length. So we’re pretty sure, yeah. But, just in case—” Dash waved a hand off to starboard, where a powerful task force of mixed Realm and League warships, commanded by the Sabertooth, maintained vigilant station.
Bercale gave a long-suffering sigh. “Good enough for me, at least, until the next time I start worrying about it.” He shot Dash a brief grin.
Dash waved grandly, smiling. “Look at this way. We might not be able to repurpose much of it for the Kingsport, but, hell, what we can use has gotta be another few hundred thousand tons of stuff we don’t have to haul through that gate.”
Bercale nodded. Custodian had been clear about that. They couldn’t employ any materials that incorporated Deeper organic components in the construction of the Kingsport. The risk of using an alien substance that could heal itself and was therefore at least somewhat alive, was just too great. It unfortunately meant that the vast majority of the huge Deeper station, almost a thousand klicks long, was hands-off.
Still, with the Backwater Gate now properly usable, Bercale could dig into the enormous task of constructing the Kingsport. Dash hadn’t hesitated to hand oversight of the project over to the man. His field of expertise was, after all, building ships and space stations. This just happened to be a particularly big space station. More to the point, though, he’d been a reliable and invaluable ally since partway through the Life War. Then, he’d hated the Golden; now, he hated the Deepers just as much.
Bercale put his hands on hips and glanced around the bridge of the Great Wall. When her keel had been laid down, she’d been meant to be another Sabertooth-class command cruiser. Bercale had repurposed her, though, into the nerve-center of the massive construction effort of the Kingsport.
“You know, that day you popped into our system in your mech and claimed to be fighting the Golden, if you’d told me I’d end up standing here, doing this . . .”
“You used up a few lifetimes-worth of luck there, my friend. I mean, what were the chances you’d end up on that particular comet?”
“Well, if the Unseen are to be believed, one hundred percent. As in, they’d been planning it all along.”
“Do you believe them?”
“Does it matter?”
Bercale sniffed and smiled. “Guess it really doesn’t, no.”
Dash left the Great Wall but didn’t immediately return to the Archetype, which was on station nearby. Instead, he had the shuttle take him to the Absolute Zero. The research ship had been moved through the Backwater Gate and into the Big Black, and now hung a few thousand klicks away from the Great Wall. Custodian and the other AIs wanted to remove the Radiant Points away from gravitational influences as much as possible while they were being studied. It removed another variable for which they had to account, and taking advantage of the Backwater Gate’s now easy access to intergalactic space seemed the logical way to do it. More to the point, the Kingsport construction site was now far more secure than any location inside the Milky Way. The Realm held both ends of the gate, and nothing would be approaching from further out in the Big Black anytime soon.
Dash found Conover, Amy, and Elois in one of the Absolute Zero’s research bays, puzzling over the two Radiant Points dash had retrieved from the lonely dwarf star system. He was surprised to see Al’Bijea was also here. Dash hadn’t even heard he’d come through the gate.
“How could I not? A chance to visit intergalactic space?” the Aquarian leader asked.
Dash smiled at that. “Maybe that’s the way to go. Space tourism, we run tours out here to the Big Black.”
“Actually, once all this unpleasantness of war is behind us, ideas such as that may not seem so silly,” Al’Bijea replied.
Dash’s smile turned thoughtful. He hadn’t really thought much about what might come after the war against the Deepers. In fact, he found himself reluctant to walk too far down that path. He’d done that once already, after the Life War, and just been pulled back into strife and bloodshed. Would he even be able to enjoy life after the Deepers, or would he always be looking up at the stars, wondering where the next threat might come from and when?
He shook himself out of his gloomy reverie. “Good point. Anyway, we’ve got a way to go before we get there.”
Conover barked out a curse. Amy patted him on the back, while Elois, and the engineers with her, just looked frustrated. Dash exchanged a glance with Al’Bijea, then they both wandered over to find out what was going on.
Or not going on, as it turned out.
“By every measure we’ve got, these two Radiant Points should be communicating with each other, but they’re not,” Conover snapped.
Amy patted his shoulder again. “With Custodian’s help, we think we’ve worked out most of the details of how the individual Radiant Points work. The next step is linking two of them since, duh, you need an entrance and an exit.”
“I gather that’s not happening,” Dash said.
Conover and Amy both shook their heads.
Al’Bijea raised a manicured finger. “You say that you’ve worked out most of the details of how they work. That implies there are some you have not. In my experience, it’s in those last few, remnant details where the answers tend to be.”
“And we’ll keep digging into them, sure,” Conover said, stepping back from the Radiant Point. “But, based on what we know right now, these two Radiant Points should be connecting, forming a link, and then operating together like a gate. Custodian has even confirmed it.”
“That’s correct,” Custodian said.
Dash blinked in surprise. “Custodian? You’re here? I thought we couldn’t maintain a reliable enough high-capacity comm link through the Backwater Gate to make it work.”
“That remains true. Technically, I am not Custodian. I am a copy of him. However, as ships pass through the gate, I am periodically uploading any new data to them, so they can transmit it back to the Forge and Custodian there can effect updates. He is doing the same for me, in reverse.”
“This is weird,” Amy said.
Dash, though, just made a huh expression. “Hey, whatever works. Should I still call you Custodian? Or Custodian Prime? Custodian 2.0? Or maybe something totally new, like Roger or Myron?”
“Custodian will suffice.”
“I kind of like Myron,” Al’Bijea said.
Dash started to turn away, to leave them working away at the Radiant Points, but Amy caught his attention. She’d suddenly gone still, her face far away.
“Amy? You okay?”
“Just a sec,” she said, holding up a hand.
They all exchanged glances and waited.
Finally, she nodded. “Yeah. That’s it. It’s just like Custodian. There’s two of him, but they’re really one. You can call him Custodian because he is, even though he’s here, and the other him is over there.”
“Amy, what the hell are you talking about?” Dash asked.
“These Radiant Points. We’ve been treating them as two separate things that have to be linked together. So we’ve been trying to get one of them to communicate with the other. But what if it’s just like Custodian? What if we just treat them as one thing?”
Dash could tell, from the sudden earnest attentiveness of everyone, including the engineers, that she’d at least gotten them intrigued.
“How would we do that, exactly?” Elois asked.
Amy scowled. “See, that’s the part I don’t know—wait.” Her face got that far-off look again. It only lasted a moment, then she perked back up.
“What if we treat them like the power cores? We know that we can get individual cores to work in twos, fours, and sixes, but combined, so they basically just become bigger cores. Why don’t we approach these things the same way?”
“Amy, I must admit that I have never considered you the most intelligent or insightful of Dash’s advisors, but I might have to reassess that conclusion,” Custodian said.
Amy’s face pinched up. “Was that a compliment?”
“I think so,” Conover replied.
Dash waved a hand. “It’s probably as close as you’re likely to get. Anyway, this gives you guys something to pursue—”
“Actually, we can pursue it right now,” Custodian put in.
“Oh? How?”
“I have full access to both Radiant Points. Rather than attempting to link them in-sequence, I will amalgamate the control programs we’ve created for each and attempt to link them simultaneously, as though they are a single device.”
Dash lifted his eyebrows. “Oh. Okay, well, go ahead. Although—is there any danger to doing that, like, right here? Or are we risking creating a black hole or something?”
“The physics of the situation precludes the formation of a singularity. Otherwise, risk remains within acceptable parameters.”
“Acceptable to whom?” Al’Bijea asked.
“To the guy who’s just admitted to being a cloned version of exactly the same guy, who’s sitting about a billion trillion klicks away,” Elois said, her tone sardonic.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Nope, not at all.”
Dash gave an elaborate shrug. “What the hell. If you guys are okay with these parameters, then so am I. Custodian, go ahead.”
For a while, nothing happened. The two Radiant Points simply sat where they were, about two meters apart, silent and motionless.
“Looks like another bust— “Elois started, but Conover cut her off.
“No, it’s not. I’m seeing new activity in both Radiant Points. Something is definitely happening.”
As soon as he’d said it, the two alien artifacts suddenly began to hum, lifted slightly off the deck, then slid away from each other until they clunked aga
inst bulkheads at the opposite ends of the research bay.
“Well, that was different,” Elois said.
Dash gave an enthusiastic nod. “I was going to head back to the Archetype, but just like Al’Bijea’s trip out here to the Big Black, this is just too good to pass up. So, if you guys don’t mind, I’m going to play with these things, too.”
They moved the two Radiant Points to the Absolute Zero’s docking bay, the largest space on the ship. Everyone was curious to see just how far they’d move and if they could get them to do anything else.
Except blow up or spawn a black hole, the physics of it notwithstanding.
By now, Viktor and Harolyn, who’d had business with Bercale, had caught wind of what was going on and had diverted to the Absolute Zero to check it out. Now they all stood, watching as Custodian once more activated the Radiant Points.
Again, they hummed, lifted, and drifted directly away from each other. This time, though, they stopped when they were about thirty meters apart.
“Well, that’s good, anyway. I was afraid that that was just how they worked, and we were going to have to wait for them to each slowly make their way to their planned gate location,” Dash said.
“Well, since I can walk faster than they were moving, that would have taken a little longer than I think we’re prepared to wait,” Viktor replied.
Dash wandered over to one of the Radiant Points. It simply sat there, humming softly. It gave off no dangerous emissions, no significant radiation at all.
He glanced back at the others. “Okay, now what?”
Conover pointed. “I’m not sure what it means, but there’s a spot right there, on the far side of it, where power seems to be concentrated.”
Dash took in where Conover had pointed, then looked at the other Radiant Point in the distance. A sudden flash of inspiration caught him. He looked around, and saw a small maintenance drone, about the size of two closed fists, mounted on its storage rack nearby. He grabbed it and, then, without further ceremony, pushed it into the apparent solid surface of the Radiant Point, where Conover had indicated.
