The Sanctum of the Sphere: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 2

by Luther M. Siler

  “This doesn’t look promising,” Asper said.

  WE WILL KEEP LOOKING UNTIL I RUN OUT OF FUEL, the Nameless said.

  Ten minutes later, they picked up a comm signal from Grond.

  “The wars have not ended,” Remember said. “Khkk remains in as much conflict as it was in before we arrived.”

  “We never thought we were going to end it,” Brazel said. “Whatever that was, we didn’t cause it.”

  “Are you not curious?” she answered.

  “No,” the gnome said, cutting Remember off. “Not a bit. The job’s over. I’ll accept the new ship as payment. I’ve got my whole family back together. I don’t see the point of further curiosity.”

  “Many of my people continue to call Khkk home,” Asper said. “We owe it to them to at least rescue whoever we can.” The elf looked at Remember. “With your permission, I would like to use your ship as a base while we evacuate everyone else we can. After that, we will locate another cell of the Noble Opposition and rejoin them.”

  Remember glanced at Grond, who shrugged.

  “What is mine is yours,” she said. “I believe we will remain here for a while longer as well.”

  “I admit I’m still curious too,” Rhundi said. She sat on the floor on a comfortable oversized cushion, most of her younger children competing with each other to find ways to lie on top of their mother. Darsi and the older children sat nearby. “There’s something very odd about that place. The ‘sphere’ the pyramid was named after? I think it was the entire center of the moon.”

  “Fascinating,” Remember said. “Are you certain?”

  “It certainly looked like it,” Rhundi answered. “The caves went off to the horizon in every direction. It may not be the whole world, but they’re pretty extensive.”

  “It must have been an enormous undertaking,” Remember said. “Perhaps some culture before the Khkks carved it.”

  “That’s the weird part,” Brazel said. “I don’t think it was carved. It wasn’t rock. The floor had a little bit of give to it. Running on it, you’d bounce a little bit.”

  Remember raised an eyebrow. Irtuus-bon, standing nearby, went through at least three different shapes and sizes in a matter of moments.

  “What?” Brazel and Grond asked simultaneously.

  The troll went digging through his things, looking frantically for something. He eventually found a datapad. He spent a few moments accessing something and then presented it, without comment, to Brazel. The gnome took the pad and looked at the information on the screen.

  “What’s a dragon?” he said.

  Thirty-Seven

  Haakoro exited tunnelspace with his fingers crossed, hoping beyond hope that he’d picked the right spot. Working the calculations to properly calibrate the needleship’s gun had tired him, and he had simply trusted to his luck and picked a sector that he thought might be close to the one the troll had pointed out. If he needed to spend a few days or weeks searching, well, it wasn’t as if he had anything more important to do.

  It wasn’t as if anyone had anything more important to do.

  His stolen ship emerged from tunnelspace into a far more populated area than he’d expected, joining a flow of other ships coming into the sector in more or less the same direction. He activated the ship’s sensors, scanning the area around him.

  He was surrounded by Benevolence. Everything nearby was transmitting Benevolence identity codes. Dozens of spiderships flew nearby in what almost looked like a leisurely fashion, and he saw models of ships he’d never even seen pictures of before.

  Several thousand kilometers in front of him, the largest ship he’d ever seen floated silently in space.

  The Testament. He’d found it.

  “I am the luckiest son of a bitch who ever lived,” he said.

  He had barely begun accelerating when the spiderships around him opened fire.

  Thirty-Eight

  Deep underground, under millions of tons of rock, the broken body of an elf lay still on the ground. The body sat in a pool of blood, strangely still liquid despite the dusty, dry air and the passage of time.

  In the silent chamber, the body of the elf twitched once, as the sound of a single sharp snap echoed. A tiny crack, the width of a finger, opened in the ground underneath it.

  The elf’s blood drained away into the depths of the Sphere.

  THE END

  June 6, 2014

  January 16, 2015

  THANK YOU

  for reading The Sanctum of the Sphere.

  If you enjoyed this book, please leave a review for it at the book review site of your choice.

  About Luther M. Siler

  Luther Siler was born in 1976. He lives in northern Indiana with his wife, three-year-old son, a dog and two cats. In his spare time he works at a middle school.

  He only occasionally refers to himself in the third person, and writing this is making him slightly uncomfortable. He is also god-awful at smiling for pictures.

  Luther Siler’s blog: http://www.infinitefreetime.com

  Follow Luther @nfinitefreetime on Twitter.

  Also by Luther M. Siler

  SKYLIGHTS

  Available in print and digitally.

  August 15, 2022: the Tycho, the most advanced interplanetary craft ever designed by the human race, launches from Earth on an expedition to Mars. The Tycho carries four passengers, soon to be the most famous people in human history.

  February 19, 2023: The Tycho loses all communication with Earth while orbiting Mars. After weeks of determined attempts to reestablish contact, the Tycho is declared lost.

  2027: Journalist Gabriel Southern receives a message from a mysterious caller: “Mars.” Ezekiel ben Zahav isn’t talking, but he wants Southern to accompany him for something— and he’s dangling enough money under his nose to make any amount of hardship worth it.

  SKYLIGHTS is the story of the second human expedition to Mars. Their mission: to find out what happened to the first.

  Read on for an excerpt: the prologue to SKYLIGHTS.

  Flashbulb memory, they call it. It’s when you remember exactly where you were when you first discovered something or saw something happen.

  If you’re younger than me, which a lot of you probably are, then your first flashbulb memory is probably related to terrorism somehow. Anybody in, say, their early thirties or older probably remembers exactly where they were on September 11, 2001. A little younger than that and your first flashbulb memory is probably one of the bombings in Chicago in 2018.

  I was six years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. It was January 29, 1986, at exactly eleven thirty-nine in the morning. I was in first grade. For some reason— I could look this up if I wanted, I suppose, but my first-grade self didn’t know, so I’m not going to bother— NASA had decided that it would be great if they put a schoolteacher on the Space Shuttle. Her name was Christa McAuliffe, and she’d been a middle school teacher, her students not a lot older than I was at the time.

  There was a ton of publicity about her presence on the shuttle. Come to think of it, that might have been the reason that NASA put her there in the first place. Every single kid in my school was watching the flight launch on television. The Challenger took off, and we all clapped. Seventy-three seconds later, an O-ring failed on the shuttle’s right Solid Rocket Booster. There was a little puff of smoke from the side of the ship.

  Some of us were still clapping.

  I remember noticing it and wondering, for the split second that I had, what had happened. And then the Challenger, with me and millions of other people around the country watching, silently blew apart. There were a few seconds of shocked silence in the room, and then every kid in the class— every one in the building, probably— started crying at once.

  You know what? Writing that just now, I wondered what my teacher must have done afterwards. I can’t even remember her name. I can remember the wood surface on my desk, because I dug my fingers into it so hard that day that
they scratched it and I got splinters. I can remember the wood-grain on the television set they had us watching. I can remember being surprised that Rachel Douglas, the biggest butthead in the entire first grade, was crying as hard as I was. But I can’t remember a single thing that our teacher did to try and bring everybody back to sanity after watching that happen. That’s how flashbulb memories work; you’ll remember the event itself forever, but that doesn’t mean you’ll remember anything else that happened around it.

  Seventeen years and two days later, it happened again. This time, it was the shuttle Columbia, and I was twenty-four and no longer sitting in a classroom. In fact, when the Columbia was falling apart in the morning sky over Texas, I was stuck in traffic and late to work. I found out about it about ten minutes after I got in, when the smarmy dope from the office next door made some sort of comment about it to me. We had the Internet by then— yes, there was Internet back then, although I think we might have still been calling it the World Wide Web— and I saw the entire thing on CNN’s Web site. This time there weren’t any tears, just a dull sort of ache in the pit of my stomach. I spent the rest of the day on the computer, chasing down eyewitness reports and trying to devour whatever little bits of actual news managed to leak out. It was funny; I hadn’t spent much time thinking about space flight since the first grade, but suddenly the families of the men and women on that shuttle were all I could think about.

  I was working for the Indianapolis Star at the time, splitting my time between a biweekly column in the science section and general reporting on local news for the rest of the paper. It was a good job; I was happy enough, and making enough money, but I wanted something different from my life.

  I decided to write a book.

  A year later, I’d completed Nothing to Bury: the Martyrs of the Space Race, a look at the lives of the astronauts who had died on the Challenger and the Columbia, as well as a host of other lives lost in the pursuit of space, and a look at the culture of NASA in between the two disasters. I was pretty proud of it as a piece of work; I wasn’t expecting it to necessarily sell well to the general public, but it was a good piece of writing. It did better than I’d expected, enough that I’ve been able to be comfortable with freelance writing since then. I’m still working for news sites and some of the few print papers that are left, mind you, but I can pick my own assignments and do my own reporting now as opposed to having people assign my projects.

  You know where this is going, don’t you? I imagine you do.

  On August 15, 2022, after years of technical and political delays, the space shuttle Tycho, carrying four astronauts, launched on a six-month journey to Mars. They were to remain in orbit around Mars for thirty days, during which they would land on the planet’s surface for the first time in human history, then to return to Earth. The run-up to the launch was the biggest public relations bonanza NASA had ever seen. Everything just stopped the day the Tycho launched. It was just like it had been for the Challenger, only times a hundred. They just weren’t as good at hype in the eighties, I guess.

  I was watching at home, with a couple of friends— I actually had a little party for the launch. I didn’t realize how tense I was until I looked at my hands afterwards. There were furrows in my palms from my fingernails. Then the shuttle took off, soaring into a perfectly blue sky, and I held my breath for a few moments.

  The launch went off without a hitch, though, and pictures of the Tycho blanketed every website and print doc on the planet over the next few days. For the next six months, everyone was obsessed with Mars. The astronauts provided regular updates on what they were doing. You could get daily blink messages from them if you wanted to, and progress along their flight path was updated live on a map running at the top of CNN.com for the entire duration of the trip. Those six months, I’m convinced, inspired a whole generation of new astronauts, astrophysicists, and pilots. I’ve never in my life seen America more excited about science. It was amazing.

  And then, on February 19th, 2023, when the long voyage was finally over, we… well, we don’t actually know what happened. The Tycho was supposed to aerobrake into orbit around Mars, stay in orbit for a day or two, and then the astronauts were going to leave the ship to descend to the planet’s surface in a lander. They were going to stay on the surface for two weeks or so, doing experiments, exploring the Martian surface, and making history.

  There wasn’t anything resembling photo evidence, not good evidence at least— NASA had been sending a steady diet of pictures and video from cameras affixed to the outside of the Tycho for months, but they failed at the same time as the audio feed. But we were getting audio beamed back from inside the cabin. Right up until the point where the flight commander, a decorated Marine pilot by the name of Alondra Gallegos, spoke the last words that the Tycho sent back to Earth.

  “Is that…” was all she said.

  After that, nothing. No sound, no signals, no big explosion to be played on the news over and over again. Just nothing at all, and what started off as mild concern slowly morphed, over the next few days, weeks, months, into the certainty that, somehow, the ship had been lost. There was hope for a while that there had just been some sort of global communications failure, that the Tycho was still out there but had lost the ability to talk to us. Sadly, those hopes didn’t make much sense in reality— the Tycho’s communication capabilities were among the simplest systems on the ship, something a talented twelve-year-old would have been able to repair, and there was a redundant backup system. Anything catastrophic enough to have completely crippled the ship’s ability to talk would have caused fatal damage to the rest of the ship as well. We just couldn’t figure out what. Conventional wisdom eventually decided there had been some sort of asteroid or meteorite impact, something like that.

  There was no flashbulb moment for the Tycho. The families of the four people lost on that mission— Alondra Gallegos, Harrison Brown, Kassius Newsome, and Ai-Li Wu— will never be able to move on. Many of them are convinced that their family members are still out there somewhere. There was no national mourning like there was for the Challenger and the Columbia. It was as if, after three high-profile ship losses, this time the country just wanted to forget about it.

  I got a few calls for interviews after the Tycho lost contact, and a few more a few months later, once NASA officially stopped trying to reestablish contact with the ship. I turned them all down, though; I didn’t want to base any more of my career on profiting from the deaths of people more heroic and important than I was. I didn’t want to write about space any more.

  Little did I know.