by J. N. Chaney
Something huge crashed through the trees, showering them with leaves, splinters, and dust.
The Archetype.
The huge mech shoved the trees aside as though they were blades of grass. At its dramatic entrance, their captors broke into a cacophony of shouts and wails. They pointed, shouted, uttered a few shrill screams, and then scattered. Some just vanished into the foliage, while others dropped to the ground, prostrate, faces pressed into the loam. By the time the Archetype had fully settled, its huge feet crushing ferns and logs before sinking into the wet soil, Dash, Leira, and Conover were the only ones still upright.
“Well, I guess we’re outside that suppressor field.” Leira got to her feet and let out a relieved breath.
Conover glared around at their would-be executioners, still all prone in the dirt. “Would have been nice to know that. We could’ve used our weapons or something.” He raised a hand as both Dash and Leira opened their mouths to remind him, again, that they weren’t here to kill innocent people. “Just to scare them off—even if they did try to drop me in a hole. Correction, a pit. Sounds a lot more ominous.”
“Indeed, you are almost one hundred meters beyond the effect of the Creators’ suppressor field,” Sentinel said. “You could have used your weapons or called for assistance at any time.”
Sentinel’s voice rang from the Archetype like a deep, mellow bell, earning another chorus of fearful gasps from the people who had, seconds earlier, thought they were in control.
He made a lowering gesture with one hand. “A little quieter, Sentinel, okay? They don’t need to hear you back on The Forge.”
“It is not possible for sound to be propagated that far, and through a vacuum.”
“Oh, for…I know that. I was just—”
“Being a smart ass, yes.”
“Wait. Did just call me a smart ass?”
Conover nodded. “She did.”
Leira smiled. “She’s finally getting to know the real you.”
Dash shaded his eyes and looked up at the Archetype, which was towering over them. “I like the whole voice-of-god thing, broadcasting out loud. Nice touch. I’m definitely rubbing off on you.”
“It is inevitable that I will, over time, come to adopt your personality. To what extent that is a good thing remains a separate question.”
Dash narrowed his eyes again. “Just a minute. I would like to point out—in my role as the Messenger, of course—that you have to adjust to me. I’m much more fun at parties.”
“You’ve never seen me at a party,” Sentinel said with great dignity.
Leira chuckled and put her hand on Dash’s shoulder. “You are not going to win an argument with a super-intelligent alien AI, my friend. Face it. She’s had a lot longer to perfect her material.”
Dash gave her a wry look, but Conover gestured around at tattooed faces starting to peer from among the leafy shadows. Curiosity, it seemed, was starting to overcome outright fear. “Save the banter for now. We can relax at the Forge. Sort of. Home, Jeeves.”
“I do not like that name,” Sentinel said.
“And you said you were fun.”
Dash was home in a sense. He stretched, and the Archetype stretched with him.
He glanced at the Slipwing. Leira had flipped her around, lighting her fusion drive in a deceleration burn as they closed on The Forge. Another half hour and they should be safely back in the station’s docking bay. Then Dash could extricate himself from the Archetype’s cradle, the intricate device that transmitted all of his movements to the big mech, strip off his sweaty clothes, and finally take a shower.
A hot shower.
Saving the universe was surprisingly hard on personal hygiene. The Archetype took care of all his physical needs while he was slung in the cradle, but its Unseen builders had definitely skimped on the creature comforts, like hot running water. Or deodorant.
“Dash, Viktor here. Custodian has some news about those power cores you retrieved. Good work on getting four of them in one trip, by the way.”
“It helps that the Unseen seem to have started doubling them up. Anyway, what’ve you got?”
“All of those cores are meant for The Forge, it seems. They’ll power up a lot more of this place. They’ll also activate…let’s see. There’ll be a defensive energy shield available around the whole station, point defense weapons against incoming attacks, and something called metallic shielding. Not sure what that last one is. Custodian says he’ll know more once it’s been brought online.”
“Got it,” Dash replied. “Sounds like they’ll make our new home here a lot more snug.”
“Just in time, too.”
Dash’s gut tightened a notch. “There something I should know, Viktor?”
“Custodian’s detected a signal. It’s weak, and indistinct, but it’s definitely real.”
“What is it?”
“And whose is it?” Leira put in. “Does it belong to the Unseen, or the Golden?”
“Can’t tell,” Viktor replied. “Can’t even determine an accurate direction, just a vague, out that way sort of thing.”
“I am receiving repeater data from Custodian,” Sentinel said. “It’s available now. Since the signal is propagating through the Dark Between, it likely originates either from a source belonging to the Creators, or to the Golden.”
Dash studied the signal on the heads-up. It was just a diffuse blob, coming from somewhere among a few dozen possible star systems. “But you can’t tell which.”
“If I could, I would have specified it.”
“You’re getting awfully snarky, you know that?”
“I did say that accommodating your personality may or may not be a good thing.”
Dash had to smile. “Yes. Yes, you did.”
2
Dash sincerely hoped that the signal would turn out to be friendly. Perhaps neutral, or even entirely uninteresting—anything but a warning of incoming danger. There’d been more than enough of that since Dash had stumbled upon the Archetype, so something not awful would be a nice change.
Fortunately, it turned out they had a way to find out. One of the systems the new cores had brought to life on The Forge was a pair of deep-scan arrays. Each had unfolded from the station’s “poles,” giving the system effectively full coverage in all directions.
Except there was a problem.
The array near the “north pole” failed to come properly online. A Golden drone that had crashed into the station and disabled many systems had left behind a sinister legacy—a pernicious virus that had insinuated itself into some of The Forge’s operations. Custodian had been able to sandbox it into a cyber-trap, but at the cost of shaving off some of the station’s functionality.
Eventually, Custodian said it would be able to get rid of the pesky cyber-intruder, but until then, some systems would have to run off bypasses. “It will be necessary to run a physical connection to the deep-scan array, at least in the short term. I will dispatch a maintenance remote for that purpose.”
Dash had been fine with that, but Amy had piped up. “Just a sec. How about we do it? I’d like to learn more about what makes this place tick.”
Viktor curled his lip at her. “You just want to get outside.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been cooped up on this station for the past couple of weeks, while Dash, Leira, and Conover have been off having fun!”
“Fun?” Leira asked with a hint of laughter. “If you call almost getting run through with a spear fun, well then, sure. Lots of fun. The swampy mud was—well, it was great for my skin, but not good for running through.”
Conover struck a brave pose without thinking. “It was pretty dangerous, Amy. I almost fell into an underground river.”
“So you’ve told me,” Amy said. “Like, a few times.”
Conover had deflated a bit at that, but Amy’s grin became a genuine smile, which seemed to perk him up.
So here Dash was, riding one of the station’s maintenance remotes from the nearest p
owered-up docking bay toward the faulty array. Amy straddled another, laughing and whooping as they raced across the sprawling plain of The Forge’s hull.
They began to slow as the array came into view, a trio of massive, parabolic dishes atop a tower at least fifty meters tall. It rose over the horizon as they approached it, as did a gleaming crescent of light.
Amy made a disappointed sound. “I could’ve just kept going, you know. Just racing around and around The Forge on this remote. Hey, we should make a game out of it. Remote racing!”
“That would be fine, if we actually controlled these things,” Dash replied. “But we’re really just passengers. And I’ve never been a good passenger. I much prefer being the driver.”
“So why’d you come along then, anyway? If you don’t like being just a passenger, then it seems to me you’d just want to give this a pass.”
“We agreed we’d always go EVA in pairs. We go safely or not at all, okay?”
“Yeah, but one of the others could’ve come with me.”
“You’re about to see why I came, Amy. In fact, there it is, now.”
The array towered above them. But that wasn’t what Dash was talking about. He gestured beyond it, to where that gleaming crescent of light had resolved itself into the gas giant around which The Forge orbited.
It swelled across the sky as they pulled up to the base of the array, a vast hemisphere blotting away most of the starfield. This close, its multitude of pastel bands resolved into swirls of gas, each the size of a planet, spinning and whirling and rushing along before thousand-kilometer-per-hour winds. He could just make out a sliver of its vast polar aurora—the charged particles exciting into a ghostly bluish glow that encircled both of its poles with halos of inconstant light.
Dash just stood and stared.
It was really no different than the view from inside The Forge or the Archetype or the Slipwing. Except, it was. It was very different. From each of those perspectives, the gas giant loomed—glorious and majestic, sure. But out here, wearing nothing but a vac suit, it had a power and sheer, raw presence that made Dash feel like…like nothing. At most, like a mote, a speck of dust against the sheer grandeur of the universe. It was almost frightening, the way the gas giant looked as though it might suddenly pull him away from The Forge.
“Dash?”
He pulled his eyes away from the view. “Sorry, what?”
“Nothing. Just…the look on your face.” Amy’s smiled behind her faceplate. “You’re such a practical, no-nonsense kind of guy. Seeing you being all awestruck like that is just kind of…” Her shoulders rose and fell slightly in a shrug. “It’s nice. Nice knowing you have a bit of poetry in your soul.”
He shrugged back. “Helps keep things in perspective. There’s a lot of universe out there full of things like that.” He pointed at the gas giant. “And of things even more spectacular. Things far, far bigger than even the Unseen.”
“Or the Golden.”
“Exactly.”
They took another moment to just bask in the glory of the vast gas giant, then turned to the task at hand. Amy’s remote had pulled a seemingly endless cable along behind it; the device could have easily hooked it up on its own, but it dutifully waited for Dash and Amy to get it plugged into the receptacle Custodian had indicated.
“The deep scan system is now coming online,” Custodian said. “It will take a moment to stabilize and begin processing incoming signals.”
“Our priority is the signal you detected earlier, so update us the second it’s ready,” Dash said. As he did, the array began moving, smoothly rotating and inclining its triple dishes toward a specific point in space.
“That was already understood.” Custodian sounded a little peeved.
Dash looked at Amy. “You know, these AI’s are starting to develop actual personalities.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Sentinel wonders the same thing. So do I, for that matter.”
“You just don’t like competition in the snark department.”
“Why do I have this reputation for being—”
“The deep scan system is now fully online,” Custodian cut in. “There is no further need for you to remain outside The Forge.”
Dash turned back to the remote that had brought him here. “Guess that’s our cue to head back inside.”
Amy moved to board her own remote. “Race you!”
“Um…sure. Custodian, make my remote go faster than hers.” He gave her a wry grin. “There. I win.”
“You’re no fun.” Amy leaned forward, urging her remote on, but it plodded along. “Come on, buddy. You’ve got this.” She bounced in her seat, but to no avail.
As the remotes accelerated back toward the docking bay, Dash glanced back at the gas giant. He watched it until it had fully set, vanishing behind the sweeping curve of the great hull.
There were things bigger than even the Unseen and the Golden. It was important to remember that.
They crowded around a display in the engine room, the place that had become The Forge’s effective command center. If there was an actual command center somewhere, it must be in a part of the station still not powered up. The Forge still held secrets, and would until every corridor was humming with power.
“Okay, Custodian, what’ve you got?” Dash said.
“The deep scan has resolved the incoming signal’s location but offers little more detail, unfortunately. It is emanating from what seems to be the location of a battle between the Creators and the Golden, on the edge of a star system known as GC67854-AS2.”
“Catchy name,” Amy said.
Viktor gave a dry smile, a testament of his fondness for the girl. “The Battle of GC67854. It’s catchy, once you get used to it.”
“If you can tell from here that it was a battlefield, then it must be a pretty extensive one,” Leira said. She narrowed her eyes at the display, which showed an area that was spotted with odd density spikes, adjacent to the subject star system. “That must be…oh, what, a good forty light years away?”
“Forty-seven point six two to the star itself,” Custodian replied.
“When Custodian says deep scan, it means deep scan, doesn’t it?” Dash said.
“Forty-seven point six two light years.” Leira crossed her arms. “I’ll say it again. It must have been an awfully big battle.”
Dash nodded. “Which means the Unseen must have kept some record of it. Custodian? Anything you can tell us?”
“Other than the fact that it occurred, the Creators recorded little information about this particular battle, at least in any database to which I currently have access. The only other reliable information the deep scan provides is that there is a considerable amount of debris.”
Dash rubbed his chin. “Okay. Sentinel, how about you? Anything to add?”
“Custodian and I have synchronized our accessible databases,” Sentinel replied. “The only specific piece of information I can add is that the star, GC67854-AS2, was a binary system before the engagement.”
Conover made a huh sound. “Was a binary system? So it isn’t anymore?” He looked around at the others. “Sounds like somebody used a Lens.”
“Excuse me,” a new voice put in, “but are you saying that the Unseen actually blew up a star during the course of the battle?”
They all turned to face the speaker, the monk named Kai. He and his fellow brothers in faith, known as the Order of the Unseen, had come to The Forge with Dash and the others during an expedition to retrieve more of the power cores The Forge and The Archetype both needed to power up their systems. Kai was unobtrusive by nature, but when he spoke, his words carried weight.
“So it would seem,” Dash said. “We partly did the same thing, remember, when we shrank this system’s star to save Leira right after the fight with the Harbinger. We just avoided the, ah—well, we didn’t actually explode the star. Just tickled the edges, so to speak.”
Kai nodded. “That I understand. My interest is
more with regard to the effect on the Enemy of All Life. I’m hoping many of them were destroyed by the Unseen’s efforts.”
Dash offered a polite nod in the face of Kai’s single-minded devotion to the cause. For a relatively mild-mannered group of people, Kai and his fellow monks had an unabashedly vicious hatred for the Golden. Not for the first time, he was glad they were on their side.
“Probably no way to know for sure,” Dash said.
“A pity.” Kai’s retort was flat with repressed emotion.
Dash turned back to the display. “So, let’s summarize. We’ve got a signal coming from an ancient battlefield a long way off. We don’t know if it belongs to the Unseen or the Golden. And…” He shrugged again. “And that’s about it. Limited information, but without the usual immediate threat. Still, this is why we’re here. To use The Forge as capably as we can, as quickly as we can.”
Kai gave a deep nod of satisfaction at that.
“I think it’s something that belonged to the Golden,” Conover said flatly.
Leira gave him a puzzled look. “Oh? Based on what?”
“Think about it. Custodian only just started receiving the signal a little while ago. We know that the Harbinger was broadcasting its own signal after it entered this system, right before it attacked the Archetype and came after The Forge,” Conover said. “Custodian, based on what you know about Golden communications, has enough time passed for the Harbinger’s signal to get to GC…um…”
“GC67854-AS2,” Custodian said, sounding a little impatient.
“Yeah, sure. That star system. Anyway, has enough time passed for that signal to get there, and this one to get back?” Conover asked.
It was Sentinel who answered. “Yes. The amount of time that has actually passed corresponds very closely to the theoretical value.”
“So it very likely is something belonging to the Golden, then,” Viktor said, narrowing his eyes at the display.
Dash grimaced. “Yeah. Something’s woken up.”
“Something large,” Custodian added. “The signal strength suggests a noteworthy source of power, considerably larger than a simple probe or scout craft. That would, therefore, correspond most closely to several types of large, Golden ships.”
