The Middle Road (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 7)

by Caleb Wachter

  “What is it?” Kongming asked.

  “I only know that it is what you asked me to provide,” the Crafter said grimly.

  “That will have to be enough,” Kongming said with a wary nod.

  “I am ordering you not to send that transmission,” Nail growled, hopping down from his command chair and reaching for the blaster pistol at his hip.

  “Transmission is away,” Kongming declared.

  “You fool!” Nail snapped, but the viewer to which his back was turned began to shimmer. Slowly, and in much the same fashion as the ripples on a pond which Kongming had alluded to earlier, the empty space before them morphed into a heart-stopping image.

  “Primarch,” Kratos said breathlessly, and the elderly Stalwart whirled with his pistol in hand to see the image on the main screen.

  Blossoming at a point directly in front of the Needle—a point no more than ten thousand kilometers distant from the little warship—was the image of a massive, rectangular panel which slowly rotated left-to-right before the comparatively miniscule Corvette.

  The panel seemed to stretch on for tens—and then hundreds!—of thousands of miles before it finally came to an end.

  “Pull back,” Nail whispered, his voice broken by what Kongming knew could only be terror, “pull back, son.”

  Hammer was too dumbfounded to move, but Kratos placed a hand against the young Stalwart’s shoulder and that seemed to spur him to action. “Pulling back,” Hammer said unsteadily after returning to his post.

  The Needle’s sensors read that, at precisely the speed of light, the ‘ripple’ which had revealed the rectangular panel before them continued to reveal similar, adjacent panels.

  “What is it?” Kratos asked tightly.

  “A mega-structure,” Kongming said, nearly dumbfounded as the Needle moved away and gained a better vantage point. “Our ancestors used to call them ‘Dyson Spheres’,” he explained, but even as the entirety of the structure was revealed to them he knew that such a term could never hope to describe the truth of what was before them.

  “Who built it?” Kratos asked, as usual driving for the heart of the issue.

  “I do not know,” Kongming said as, suddenly and without warning, the same ripple effect which had revealed the Dyson Sphere before they began to re-cloak it in the unthinkably advanced concealment systems which had previously hidden it from their view.

  As he pored over the brief window of clear sensor data, he realized that the massive panels which orbited the relatively small star at the Sphere’s center were merely the outer layer of a densely-packed, perfectly-coordinated set of ever-smaller spheres likely composed of similar panels.

  After a little more than a minute from the initial transmission, the Dyson Sphere was once again hidden. For all intents and purposes, there appeared to be nothing off the Needle’s bow but a patch of empty, featureless space.

  Silence hung over the bridge as everyone present attempted to grapple with what they had just seen. Kongming alone was engaged in trying to parse the sensor feeds which they had gained during the short-lived window through which they had glimpsed the largest structure ever recorded by humans.

  Eventually, Kratos broke the silence, “Can you do that again?”

  Chapter XXIII: The Watchful Eye

  “It is not simply a Dyson Sphere,” Kongming explained after several hours spent reviewing the roughly minute-long sensor window which the Crafter’s code had provided. “It is hundreds of Dyson Spheres, each smaller than the one beyond it, and these structures harness the total output of the star.”

  “They are the stuff of legend…we must be mistaken,” Nail objected lamely.

  “No,” Kongming said firmly, “we are not mistaken. Somehow, by harnessing the total output of the star it conceals, this mega-structure is able to conceal its own existence so cleverly that even at a range of less than ten thousand kilometers we only registered the barest hint of abnormalities when scanning the space which the structure occupies. We are fortunate we did not crash into it,” he added pointedly.

  “Why build something so vast?” Kratos asked.

  “That is difficult to say,” Kongming admitted, though he had drawn one likely conclusion after putting together all of the available data, “but, if my suspicions are correct, this is what was once known as a Matrioshka Brain.”

  “A what?” Nail demanded.

  Kongming pulled up the only example of such a structure that he could find—and that example was found in a cheap holo-vid which he had brought from the Prejudice. The crude image of massive panels orbiting and counter-orbiting each other was laughably improbable, but for all its technical faults Kongming was surprised at just how much the vid’s makers had gotten right about such a colossal structure.

  “There are hundreds of thousands of independent satellites orbiting this star,” he explained, zooming in on the holo-vid’s example, “and, if it is indeed a Matrioshka Brain, each of those satellites contributes to the general function of the Brain—which is obviously to process data.”

  “It is a computer?” Kratos asked incredulously.

  “Not just a computer,” the Crafter interjected, “but, at least in theory, one of the largest and most powerful cogitative devices possible to construct within our universe.”

  Kongming nodded, “Philosophers often opine that a Matrioshka Brain could—again, in theory—simulate entire universes in real time. The arguments, as they are apparently made, suggest that once a computer could simulate reality in real time it would be impossible to distinguish actual reality from virtual reality.”

  “What a ridiculous idea,” Nail grumbled.

  “Perhaps,” Kongming allowed, having already formed an opinion as to how this Matrioshka Brain might be related to his own strange transformation—a transformation which involved the Ancient neural tissue he had been infected with so many months earlier. Creating and then unraveling the ‘threads of probability’ would be precisely within the ability of a Matrioshka Brain. “In any case,” he refocused on the task at hand, “I think it is imperative that we investigate this structure directly.”

  “Wait,” Nail blurted between bites of his banana, “you want to go inside that thing?”

  “I do,” Kongming nodded before adding, “but I must go alone.”

  “Why speak such nonsense?” Kratos asked coolly. “I am tasked with your safety; do you think yourself clever enough to escape my watchful eye?”

  Kongming could not help but grin as he replied, “Perhaps I could have when you only had one eye, but that is no longer the case.”

  Kratos returned the grin and the Crafter said, “I do not know any more about what is inside that thing than the rest of you, but I suspect that I was not given the key to a door I was forbidden to enter.”

  Kongming sighed, “Then we bring Abyss, also.”

  “The Bug?” Kratos asked with a furrowed brow.

  “Yes,” Kongming nodded, “I have a feeling that whatever—or whoever—awaits within the sphere is responsible for many of the seemingly disjointed events which have led us to this moment. And that entity, in its cryptic way, requested the presence of myself, Kratos, the Crafter and Abyss.”

  “Then why the pretense?” the Crafter asked with a curious expression.

  Kongming shrugged, “I believe in the concept of free will.”

  “Notwithstanding such nonsense,” Kratos grunted as he stood from the table, “I will see that the shuttle is prepared.”

  “You will need a pilot,” Nail said while shaking his head, “but I can’t ask my family to go with you.”

  “I can pilot the shuttle,” the Crafter assured the Primarch. “What of the Void Hunters?”

  “They stay aboard the Needle,” Kongming insisted before turning to Nail urgently. “If we do not return in one hundred hours, you are ordered to return to the mission itinerary.”

  “I’m not much for diplomacy,” Nail muttered before nodding, “but I’ll carry on without you if you do
n’t come back.”

  “One hundred hours, Primarch,” Kongming reiterated.

  “We’ll hold to it,” Nail assured him.

  “Then we should get moving,” Kongming said, and the team prepared for the away mission.

  “Docking clamps disengaged,” the Crafter reported from pilot’s seat in the unnamed shuttle assigned to the Unthreadable Needle. “Lifting off.”

  The Crafter guided the shuttle out of the Needle’s starboard hangar and gently brought the nose of the craft around to point at the ominous, empty-looking patch of space that the shuttle’s occupants knew contained one of the greatest mysteries ever discovered by humanity.

  The small craft drew steadily nearer to the invisible mega-structure, and soon the Crafter engaged braking thrust and brought the shuttle to a dead stop.

  “We are five hundred kilometers from the surface,” the Crafter reported, and on the tactical screen beside the pilot’s instrumentation panel the virtual image of the Dyson Sphere rotated just as it had done when they had seen it with their own eyes.

  “If the panels are moving with the same angular momentum, and in the same orientation as before,” Kongming mused, “then we should transmit the signal in two minutes in order to visualize the relatively tiny opening to the sphere’s interior.”

  The two minutes passed and the Crafter transmitted the signal, causing the exact same rippling phenomenon to blossom outward from the bow of the shuttle. This time a relatively small gap between the unthinkably large plates appeared and the Crafter gunned the shuttle’s engines, driving to reach that gap before it was once again cloaked like the rest of the sphere would be in less than a minute.

  The shuttle easily slid through the gap between the sphere’s outer panels. The panels were surprisingly thin—no more than a meter at most—and once on the other side, there was only the faintest hint of light detectable by the shuttle’s instruments between the next layer of panels. Those panels appeared to be several thousand kilometers within the outer layer of panels. The sensors were unable to determine the composition of the panels, except the edges which appeared to be reinforced primarily with iron.

  Kongming watched the stern-mounted camera as the gap through which they had entered seemed to vanish entirely, along with the panels that bordered it. The sensors no longer read the outer panels as existing, but the inner layer was still plainly visible on the shuttle’s sensors.

  “This is extraordinary,” Kratos said, and from experience Kongming knew that the big Tracto-an was uncannily difficult to confound, intimidate, or otherwise inspire to awe.

  “It is,” Kongming agreed as the Crafter adjusted the shuttle’s course to make for the nearest gap in the second layer of panels.

  “We may never return from this,” the Crafter said casually as the shuttle approached, then passed through the second gap. Again, the third layer appeared to be several thousand kilometers star-ward from the second, and the Crafter added, “Though I doubt anyone present would mind much if we manage to satisfy our collective curiosity.”

  Abyss was curiously silent, but Kongming saw that he appeared to be relaxing and looked unconcerned with the events transpiring in the cockpit where the rest of his fellow passengers had congregated.

  “We should look for a feature of some kind,” Kongming suggested, though he found no such features anywhere within sensor range—which, obviously, was extremely limited due to the fact that the shuttle’s sensors could not penetrate the Matrioshka Brain’s panels. “But until we find one, keep going deeper inside.”

  Twenty hours elapsed as they carefully picked their way through the miniscule gaps in the layers of the Sphere. By Kongming’s calculations they had only traverse a quarter of the sphere’s radius, but the further in they went the more convinced he was that the sphere was indeed a Matrioshka Brain.

  “Every layer in here is progressively thicker,” he noted, “though it seems the panels—ignoring their edges—are little more than a few millimeters thick even at this strata.”

  “Ambient temperature is only marginally higher at this depth compared to the outer shell,” the Crafter mused. “Average local temperature is only six degrees kelvin.”

  The shuttle slipped through yet another gap between the segments, and when it did so the ambient light increased to several times its previous luminosity.

  “What is it?” the Crafter asked.

  “I do not know,” Kongming replied as he saw that significant amounts of light were now showing through the next layer of gaps between the sphere’s independently rotating segments. The ship’s grav-plates seemed to ‘hiccup’ for a moment, decreasing their artificial pull suddenly before resuming the standard gee forces programming into the control systems. A quick check confirmed, “Local gravity has increased significantly; by these estimates there is a relatively small red dwarf star at the center of this mega-structure.”

  “That should be expected,” the Crafter said dismissively, “red dwarfs are far longer-lasting than larger stars; it would be a waste of materials to construct a Matrioshka Brain around a larger, shorter-lived star since it would only function for a fraction of the time that a smaller system centered on a red dwarf would function.”

  Kongming nodded, having familiarized himself with most of the literature available to them on the subject of such mind-numbingly enormous—and, until now, purely theoretical—feats of engineering.

  “I am detecting something,” the Crafter said, and Kongming confirmed that there was indeed an irregularity present near the next gap through which their shuttle had been maneuvering to pass. “It appears to be…” the Crafter trailed off, and Kongming found that he too was at a loss for words to describe the structure.

  The panels thus far had been utterly uniform with the others of their orbital depths, but this particular panel had a large, crystalline structure built near its edge.

  In fact, further examination showed that the layer of panels on which that structure was erected was composed of the same crystalline material as the structure—a significant difference when compared to the unreadable materials comprising the outer layers of the structure.

  “If I did not know better,” Kongming said evenly as he magnified a long, vertical spire extending from the edge of the structure, “I would say that looks like a docking port.”

  “Indeed,” the Crafter agreed. “And it is attached to a significant structure…which is rectangular, measures two thousand kilometers on its longest edge, and stands a median height of ten meters from the surface of the panel’s outer surface.”

  “Two thousand kilometers?” Kratos repeated.

  “There is more,” Kongming said after his sensors returned a strange, ceramic signature near the docking port, “there appears to be a ship docked at the port—and it appears to be of the same construction as the shuttle we recovered from the Unbordered colony,” he finished, turning to the Crafter who wore a look of what seemed like genuine surprise.

  “I can assure you,” the Crafter said while decelerating and adjusting course to make for the docking port, “I am at least as surprised as you appear to be.”

  A few minutes later the shuttle settled into position beside the docking ring, which instantly extended a shaft of what the sensors read to be liquid crystal. That crystal formed a perfect seal around the shuttle’s lone boarding hatch, and a quick check of the atmosphere beyond showed it to be a breathable mix of nitrogen, and oxygen, and nothing else.

  “We were expected,” the Crafter said as Kratos finished donning his power armor.

  “It would seem so,” Kongming agreed. “But, just the same, EVA protocols should be observed.”

  “Of course,” the Crafter agreed.

  “Abyss,” Kongming said, turning to the Director Bug as he felt genuinely torn about how to proceed, “we don’t have any breathing apparatuses that will fit you. Do you prefer to stay in the shuttle or come inside?”

  “Motion is unnecessary,” the Bug replied.

  “All
right,” Kongming nodded, feeling a rising excitement well up within himself as Kratos clomped his way over to the hatch, “let’s go find some answers.”

  Chapter XXIV: The Maligned Middle

  The shaft which connected the shuttle to the crystalline structure was perfectly designed to accommodate humans—even one as large as the power-armored Kratos, who took point during the two hundred meter walk from the shuttle’s airlock to the main structure.

  The gravity within the crystalline passageway was a perfect 0.9 standard, but Kongming was far from surprised at this point. Dozens—no, hundreds or perhaps even thousands—of events had transpired in perfect harmony to bring them to this point. And the more he had learned these past few months, the more clearly he saw the fingerprints of a single entity who had orchestrated those events.

  They reached the end of the passage and arrived a perfectly featureless, opaque wall which appeared to be composed of the same material as the rest of the crystalline corridor.

  “How do we open it?” Kratos asked, hefting his blaster rifle suggestively.

  “No,” Kongming shook his head, stepping forward to examine the flat, circular pane of opaque crystal, “I doubt we would be required to force entry—or, more pointedly, I doubt your weapon would succeed in doing so.”

  Kratos grunted disapprovingly, but Kongming decided to try something out a cheap holo-vid: he reached out with his gloved hand and touched the pane of crystal barring their way. Unfortunately, nothing happened.

  He sighed, undoing the seal at his glove’s cuff and muttering in his native Qin, “These are the fruits of a life spent watching holo-dramas…”

  He removed his glove and this time when he placed his fingers against the opaque pane he was rewarded with a warm, tingling sensation that ran up his arm and seemingly suffused his entire body. It was surprising but far from uncomfortable, and he was almost disappointed when the feeling subsided and the opaque crystalline panel before them slowly began to melt away.