“Damn you bastards,” he muttered. “If you worked for me, I’d fire you all. You dismantled a star projection?”
Closing the box, he pushed it backward and dislodged something else. Instinct sent him diving for the computer tablet before it hit the floor, and he stared at the black square with questioning hope and horror for several long seconds before he straightened up.
“You didn’t,” he murmured. He checked the date on the label. It was recent—they’d loaded this box onto the ship within hours of Defiance’s arrival in D-L-T-Three.
The plan, presumably, had been to put a holographic copy of the star projection there…but if the tablet had been abandoned and forgotten in the crisis, there were all kinds of possibilities.
Rin’s hands were trembling as he settled cross-legged on the floor and pulled out his communicator. He’d have to find Murtas’s people if he was right, but he might have just struck solid gold.
“It’s a separate network,” the intelligence officer told him several hours later. After Rin had confirmed there was live data on the tablet, Murtas had turned out to be aboard the military freighter.
He was apparently in command of the ship, since Rin had completely missed that they’d left the D-L-T-Three a full two cycles earlier. The archeologist wasn’t entirely sure how the freighter was being flown, but they were in hyperspace and following Defiance back to Kosha Station.
Murtas had brought six noncoms with him, equally split between his Navy Intelligence hands and the cyberwarfare specialists from Vichy’s Marines. They were sweeping the secured vault with extremely sensitive scanners and had already produced three more tablets and a cubical personal computer.
“None of these machines were linked to the main ship network, so the purge order didn’t affect them,” Murtas continued. “They were encrypted and secured, but the code is old. We’re in, Dr. Dunst.”
He handed the tablet back to Rin.
“My people are going to track down the remaining tablets, and we’re already taking a download of everything,” he noted. “You’re welcome to keep one of them and access the network, but I’d ask that you not edit anything.”
“Please, Speaker, I am at least somewhat familiar with the concepts involved here,” Rin replied with a chuckle. “My preference would be that we copy everything to a personal computer we control and I dig into that, but for the moment, there is one thing I must see.”
It took him seconds to find the file he was looking for.
The tablet’s intended final form would have been a glorified holoprojector, with the single file that showed how to set up the projection stored in it. With the interruption of Defiance’s arrival, it had been left with a connection to the private network the cult’s scientists had been running.
That connection had let Murtas track the rest of the machines. Rin doubted the working machines of the cult’s archeologists would give them everything, but at the very least, they would explain what the cult had found on these particular artifacts.
Most importantly, though…
The holographic version of the Alava star projection filled the empty space above the table. Rin touched a few controls, adjusting its size.
“Can we bring the lights down in here?” he asked. “Someone?”
One of the Marines was already there, dimming the lights to make the holographic chart visible.
“These things have always been traps,” Murtas noted drily. “All we find in them is death and confusion.”
“Well, most of the ones we’ve seen before used a pretty standard iconography,” Rin pointed out. “Silver was fueling stations, gold was colonies or major projects, copper was known autochthonous civilizations.”
He stepped back to study the projection, and Murtas stood next to him.
“I’m not seeing any of those, Doctor,” Murtas said quietly.
The stars in the projection all looked the same at first glance, plain steel ball bearings hung in the air.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Rin replied. “The whole point of these maps was to provide a physical local chart of their assets.”
The projections had actively updated too, with computers controlling the positions of each of the tiny orbs until their power cut off fifty thousand years before.
“And this should also be showing how to rebuild the pile of thread and baubles they stuffed in that box.” Rin poked at his communicator, accessing the tablet’s files remotely and looking for the build instructions. Skimming through them… “Wait; I’m changing the contrast.”
It was a theoretically tiny change, but the Alava had possessed superior vision to humans, at least. As soon as the numbers included in the instruction set took hold, the difference was clear.
“Some of the stars are marked in titanium instead of steel,” Murtas concluded. “That feels…wrong.”
“They would know the difference, but anyone from the main Alava Hegemony wouldn’t know what was important. The people out here needed a map of their systems, like any other Alava, but they didn’t want the other Alava to know what was important to them.”
“How rogue were these people?” the taller man asked, looking at the model. “My rough count gets over a hundred stars flagged as titanium, Doctor. This isn’t a few rogue colonies. This is an entire rogue empire.”
“Helps answer where ten billion Alava and servants went, doesn’t it?” Rin asked. “If they scooped up a new race or two of servants without telling the main Hegemony, they could easily have built a new state out here.
“But why? They focused more on biotech than the main Hegemony, but the degree to which the Hegemony didn’t know about this is strange. We didn’t name the main Alava state the Hegemony by random choice, Speaker. The Alava were an extremely homogenous state. They weren’t a monolithic culture, but they were closer than most the Imperium has encountered.
“I’d have said they didn’t go rogue,” he concluded. “Except now I’m wondering how much of that was just the Hegemony’s view of the galaxy. And how many rogue hundred-star states were hanging around the Hegemony’s periphery, concealing their true extent from the empire we assumed contained their entire species.”
“Well, that sounds like we’re going to find all kinds of weird shit on the edge of the galaxy, aren’t we?” Murtas asked. “Helps keep us employed.”
“Us and the rest of the Arm Powers,” Rin agreed. “Most importantly right now, Speaker, is that I don’t see an answer in this map about where the Womb is. I was hoping they’d have marked their megastructures in gold like the Hegemony did out toward Arjtal.”
“I figured,” Murtas said. “Even a hundred star systems isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, Doctor. Once our reinforcements arrive, we’ll start scouting the nearer ones and work our way out.
“It might not be a big glowing look here sign, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.”
“I’ll keep looking through these files,” Rin promised. “There has to be an answer in here.”
“No, Dr. Dunst, there doesn’t,” the Navy officer told him. “There might be, but we’ve already got more out of this museum vault than I was expecting. You can keep going through it all, but as the acting captain of this ship, I am going to give you very specific orders.
“Is that going to be a problem, Doctor?”
Rin turned to look at the other man and arched a questioning eyebrow.
“You are going to get the fuck out of this vault, shower, eat a meal, and sleep for at least twelve hours,” Murtas told him. “Because according to the Marines, you’ve gone six days on ration bars and a total of thirty hours of sleep.
“If you convince your bodyguards you can continue your studies while taking decent care of yourself, I’ll let you. Otherwise, your time in here is going to start being specifically restricted by the Marines. Am I clear?”
“I…I can do that, I suppose,” Rin admitted with a chuckle. “There’s just so much here.”
“And it will still be here
when you’re showered, fed, and rested,” Murtas replied. “And my Captain will kill me if I deliver you to Kosha Station in your current state, Dr. Dunst.”
Rin looked at the officer in surprise. It took him a moment to realize none of the noncoms were close enough to have heard that, and he watched Murtas put a finger over his lips.
“I’m an intelligence analyst, Dr. Rin,” the younger man noted. “My job is to read patterns. So, you can do your research, yes, but I’m not delivering the man who owes my Captain a date to the station as a disheveled, smelly mess.
“Are we clear?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
“A hundred stars?”
Defiance might not have hyperfold communications, but they were close enough to Child of the Great Mother to carry on radio communication. So long as the two ships were within a light-second of each other in hyperspace, they could see each other and talk to each other.
So, Dr. Dunst’s discovery had been sent over, leaving Commander Rogers staring at the hologram of a Precursor star chart and questioning the sheer size of their search area.
“One hundred and seven,” Morgan confirmed. She was looking at the notes as she sat behind her desk, the chart hanging over the plain metal surface between her and her First Sword. “We’re also not actually clear on which star system this particular chart came from, so the first priority I’m going to drop on Nguyen’s team is matching this up to the real world.”
Fifty thousand years of stellar drift made that hard enough even when you had a defined point in the central star. Without that, it could easily take Morgan’s tactical team days to map the star chart to realspace.
“It’s something,” Rogers admitted. “More than we had before we hit D-L-T-Three. Still feels pretty sparse to have lost lives for.”
“We neutralized a major Children position and captured what I suspect is their most capable vessel, even if Child is not a warship,” Morgan said. “We did well at D-L-T-Three, Commander Rogers.
“I want you to work with Commander Nguyen on this chart,” she continued. “We need to locate all of the stars the Precursors flagged in this area. Some will just be fueling depots. Some will be colonies. Some might just be points of interest—but some of those will be local intelligent species, and we have obligations there under the Kovius Treaty.”
Kovius was a Mesharom star system. The treaty signed there, around when humanity had been working out how to build pyramids, protected “younger” species from existing powers. Morgan had to flag a forty-light-year radius around a new species’ homeworld that couldn’t be exploited.
Those stars would be reserved for the species in question. Imperial policy was to watch undeveloped races and not to interfere until they’d developed hyperdrive on their own.
Of course, at that point, they were to be semi-voluntarily annexed. Membership in the Imperium came with many privileges, but no one was going to pretend the A!Tol had given any of their uplifted vassals a choice in the matter.
“Somewhere in those hundred and seven stars is apparently a biological shipyard attached to a star,” Morgan concluded. “We find that, we find the Children and we end this damn mess.”
“Any idea for hints?” Rogers asked, looking at the star chart.
“Not a one right now,” Morgan admitted. “Let’s get the chart mapped to our charts and see what we’re looking at. Some answers might fall out that aren’t obvious right now.”
“Fair enough.” The First Sword studied the map and shook her head. “I’m glad we’re getting reinforcements. For the first time since we started talking about this, I think we might be better off without battleships.”
“If they’d sent battleships, we’d have a division of battleships and an echelon of cruisers coming,” Morgan agreed. “It would take a lot longer to sweep a hundred stars with ten ships than with thirty.”
“Exactly. I still wish we had at least one battleship in the region.”
“Echelon Lord Davor has us,” Defiance’s Captain told her First Sword. “Defiance is more powerful than any battleship in the Imperium’s service was when Earth was annexed. Three decades makes for many changes.”
“I was born in an Imperial colony, sir,” Rogers reminded her. “I don’t know if Hope would have been colonized soon enough for that without the A!Tol. Things change.”
“And our job is to make sure those changes don’t hurt the people of the Imperium,” Morgan said. “Defiance isn’t a capital ship by a modern standard, but she’s still one of the most capable vessels of her size. We’ll carry the brunt of what comes, First Sword.”
“I know, sir. And we’ll carry it well; you have my word on that.”
“I don’t suppose you had any sudden inspiration on the star chart you didn’t share in the report Murtas sent over?” Morgan asked the man in her screen.
Dunst looked freshly rested, showered, and shaved. From the rumblings she’d been getting up unofficial channels, that had probably required someone to sit on him. The security vault on Child had been his dream and nightmare combined.
“Not yet,” he admitted. “I haven’t been back in the vault since that was sent over. I, ah, had been overdoing it and needed to rest.”
“You’re no good to us if you work yourself to death, Rin,” Morgan told him. “We’re still three cycles out of Kosha Station. We have time for you to find a miraculous answer.”
“I have some ideas that I didn’t have before I rested,” he admitted. “We’ve been focusing on the ‘official files’ on that network, but I’m curious to see what a clearly Institute-trained archeologist was writing in their private notes about the cult they’d ended up surrounded by.”
“Do we know who she was?” Morgan asked.
“We know who they were,” Rin corrected. “Catatch sterile named Al-Ka. They were the one rigging the antimatter core to explode, so I know that Al-Ka bought into the whole cult. Which, given that I would expect Institute training to inure someone to being caught by a cult, I find rather concerning.”
“What do we know about Al-Ka?”
“Not much yet. We IDed them after we entered hyperspace. I’ll request their Institute file when we arrive; that might help us trace more of just how an Imperial military freighter ended up out here with those kinds of people on board.”
“Parts of this stink,” Morgan agreed. Murtas had raised his conspiracy theories with her, but she’d told him to keep the theories to himself for now. She still wanted her people’s eyes open.
And while Rin was definitely not one of “her people” in a specific and valuable sense, he was still part of this mess.
“I’m going to go through their private files and see if there’s anything useful in there,” Dunst concluded. “That’s the extent of my brilliance at the moment. We’ll see what shakes out.”
“So we shall,” Morgan agreed. “For my part, Nguyen’s team is working on mapping that star chart. Without a reference point, it’s harder than you might think.”
“I’ve done it with a reference point, and that was bad enough,” Dunst admitted. “I’m extremely appreciative of Commander Nguyen’s efforts.”
“I’ll let her know,” she promised. “One more thing, Doctor.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“If you have time, feel free to research the restaurant listing for Kosha Station some more,” she told him. “You do still owe me dinner. The first night back while everyone else digests our various time bombs sounds right to me.”
He chuckled.
“I’ll see what I can do, Captain Casimir,” he promised.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Office politics crossed species and cultural bounds like nothing else, in Rin’s experience. Dr. Al-Ka, a scientist with a list of qualifications to easily match Rin’s own, spent most of their journal complaining about their fellow Children, stooping so low as to call the bridge crew “a collection of hormone-addled seeders and breeders.”
Rin had needed to look up the meaning of th
at. Apparently, the Catatch reproduced in litters of twenty-plus children, all born as steriles like Al-Ka. A randomly selected set of the litter would be treated with hormones to become biologically male and female to create the next generation of Catatch.
The Imperium treated all three Catatch genders as equal. The Catatch emancipation movement was politically acknowledged but still fighting an uphill social battle. “Seeders and breeders” were regarded as losing intelligence to the hormones that allowed them to reproduce.
The fact that the breeding sets had historically been kept locked away in specially built glorified prisons and deprived of even the most basic education had nothing to do with that, Rin was sure.
Most Catatch steriles wouldn’t call someone a seeder or a breeder unless angry, though, and Al-Ka was apparently perpetually frustrated with Child of the Great Mother’s command crew.
Al-Ka had also drawn double duty as one of the senior engineers on Child, an apparently self-taught role. It wasn’t clear from the journal what had happened to the ship’s original engineer, but then, it wasn’t clear where Child could have come from.
Only the last hundred or so cycles’ worth of entries were in the electronic file, and Al-Ka clearly had a solid sense of operational security. The Children were determined to protect the location of their god, and the archeologists among their numbers had been fully on board.
Al-Ka had been studying the ruins at D-L-T-Three to see what information they could retrieve on the “birth of the Great Mother,” presumably the original construction of the organic machine the Children now worshipped.
Most of their work had been cataloging the artifacts aboard the ship, and they had complained mightily about the degree to which they had been required to act as the freighter’s engineer.
And yet the Catatch’s faith in the Great Mother, their belief in the strange deity the Children had found, was unwavering in the text. The sheer awe Al-Ka wrote of the Mother with chilled Rin.
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 21
