by J. N. Chaney
“Look,” Dash said, “I honestly don’t really care if you stole it. Hell, I’ve come into the possession of more than a few things myself by, let’s call it by creative acquisition.” He uncrossed and re-crossed his feet on the comms. “The question is, how badly do they want it?”
“Oh, they want it badly,” Viktor said. “But they must not be allowed to get it.”
“Gee,” Dash said, “you think? Nobody should have that thing.” He smirked. “That is, assuming it does what you claim it does, which I still find a little hard to believe.”
Conover, who’d been watching the conversation bounce back and forth, asked, “What does it do?”
Dash leaned toward him and, in an elaborate stage whisper, said, “It makes stars blow up.”
Conover looked at all three of them, then shook his head. “Unlikely. No device you could be carrying aboard this ship would have more than a tiny fraction of the power needed. Maybe, if you could tap into another star…” He frowned. “Even then, though, a device like that would have to be, well, huge.”
“That’s my thinking,” Dash said. “Something like that, if it actually worked, would be worth”—he searched for a word—“a hell of a lot. But it doesn’t matter if it really works, though, as long as Clan Shirna believes it does.”
“It really does work,” Viktor said.
“Oh? Really? How many stars have you blown up with it so far, Viktor?” Dash asked.
“Well, none. But we wouldn’t.”
“Clan Shirna certainly would, though,” Leira said. “They’re insanely xenophobic, thinking that all other lifeforms in the Galactic Arm—”
“The whole universe, actually,” Viktor put in.
“Yes, anyway,” Leira went on, “they believe that only Clan Shirna itself should exist. No other forms of life are permitted. Otherwise, the purity of creation is diminished.”
Dash raised his eyebrows. “Wow. What a bunch of assholes.”
Leira nodded and was going to continue, but Conover, who’d been staring at his feet, said, “Maybe if it could somehow cause iron to start fusing in the star’s core, that could work. It would still take immense power, but…” He broke off, still staring, his mind obviously racing.
Dash lowered his feet back to the deck. “Yeah, that’s what Leira and Viktor said. This Lens uses wormholes, somehow, to make a star start producing iron.”
“So it undergoes gravitational collapse,” Conover said, his voice distant, “then rebounds—an explosion. A nova, a supernova, if the star is big enough.” Dash got the impression the kid was somehow seeing it happen.
“Yeah,” Dash said, “but that’s not possible, is it?”
Conover shrugged. “It’s still extremely unlikely, but anything is possible. And if it was made by the Unseen…”
“Just imagine such a capability,” Leira said, “in the hands of someone as rabidly xenophobic as Clan Shirna.”
Using exploding stars as a weapon? Yeah, that would be a quick war.
“Okay,” Dash said, “let’s assume this is all true. You said you found this in the…the Pasture, you called it, right? Could there be more of these Lenses there?”
Viktor shifted uncomfortably. “It’s possible. It was made by the Unseen, we think. There could be a lot more of their tech there.”
“We really couldn’t stick around and look,” Leira said. “Clan Shirna keeps a pretty close eye on the place. They seem to think it’s special, maybe even holy in some way.”
“Can I see it?” Conover asked.
Leira looked at Viktor, who sighed and dug the Lens out of his belt pouch. “We haven’t had a chance to study it much. I tried a few tests before Clan Shirna ran us down and attacked but wasn’t able to learn much. It’s pretty, um, arcane, I guess.”
Conover held out his hand. “Let me see it.”
Viktor offered him the Lens.
Conover held it both hands, studying it. A long moment passed. When he finally looked up, he said, “It…”
Then he froze, his eyes turned blank white, and he toppled back in the copilot’s seat. Dash gaped for a moment, then jumped out of his seat and took a close look at the kid.
“I-I think he’s…” Dash looked at the others. “I think he’s dead.”
6
Dash hefted Conover and rushed him to the autodoc, Leira and Viktor hurrying along behind him…only to have the kid moan and start squirming half-way there.
“Wait…you’re not dead?” Dash swerved into the crew module and deposited Conover onto a bunk. He glanced back at the others. “Could’ve sworn he was dead—”
“You thought…I was dead?”
Dash turned back to Conover, sprawled on the bunk. “Well…yeah. You sure seemed it—”
“So why take me…to the autodoc?” The kid struggled to sit up. “Kind of… a waste of time…don’t you think…?”
Dash curled his lip. “Because it couldn’t hurt. And you’re welcome, by the way.”
“For what?”
“For…oh, never mind.”
“What happened?” Leira asked. Dash noticed she’d retrieved the Lens and now clutched in both hands, but much more warily than she had previously. Probably a good idea, actually…not leaving star-exploding alien artifacts just lying around. But Dash understood her caution. What had just happened? What had the Lens just done to Conover?
Conover levered himself up, putting his feet on the deck but remaining slumped, looking drained. Viktor produced a cup of water for him, which he took and slurped.
Dash frowned as the kid kept drinking water, instead of offering explanation. Finally, he tapped Conover’s arm. “Hey…what happened to you?”
Conover lowered the cup. “I saw…stuff.”
“Stuff.”
The young man nodded. “Yeah. With these.” He pointed at his eyes.
“You saw stuff…with your eyes.” Dash glanced at Leira and Viktor, but they both looked as puzzled as he felt. “Well, that’s really impressive, but—”
“No,” Conover said, “…or, I mean…yeah, with my eyes. But not just my eyes. I got these a few years back, part of a deal my aunt Pirelli made with…I don’t know, some trader. They’re lenses that go in my eyes. They let me see schematics, technical and scientific data, that sort of thing, when I look at stuff. I thought it’d be…you know, interesting to check out that Lens with them.”
“Yeah, well, don’t do that again,” Dash said. “It almost killed you.”
Conover shook his head. “No it didn’t. It was…” The kid paused, frowning. “It was more like there was too much data. Like, when I looked at the Lens, some kind of link happened between it and these lenses in my eyes. A lot of data flowed across it, really fast. And I mean a lot, and fast. It was like…like data was pouring right into my brain.”
Dash said, “Ah,” and looked at the others. He wasn’t really the scientific type; he knew enough to get and keep a ship running, make it maneuver and go where he wanted it to, do proper astrogation…but that didn’t mean he understood the underlying details, all the complex physics and math, chemistry and such, that made it all work at some fundamental level. So he wasn’t especially keen on a long-winded talk about how the Lens worked, just—
“So is it real?” he asked Conover. “Does it actually blow up stars?”
Conover stared at his feet for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah…it does.”
Silence, except for the thrum and rumble of the Slipwing’s systems. It struck Dash that Conover’s assertion this Lens could make stars explode really didn’t carry any more inherent weight than Leira’s and Viktor’s, but something about the kid and the way he talked sure made it seem like it did.
Leira apparently thought so, too. “Conover…what did you see?”
“Yes,” Viktor put in. “Tell us as much as you can. What you remember, anyway.”
“I…kind of remember it all. But I also kind of don’t. It’s like…someone told me a story about something they’d seen, or don
e, and I remember that, but not the actual thing…” The kid glanced up from his feet and looked around. “You know?”
“I think we know what you mean,” Leira said, nodding. “Really, though…anything you can tell us could be useful.”
Dash, intrigued despite his natural skepticism, nodded. “Yeah. What did you see, exactly?”
Conover sipped water. “I saw…that which is not. The Unseen. I saw them. They’re real.”
“Guess we can’t call them Unseen anymore,” Dash said, “if you saw them.”
He’d meant it to be funny, but no one smiled. Conover glanced at him. “Okay, I didn’t see them, exactly. I saw…the things they’ve done. This Lens is just one of them. A small part of…something much bigger. It’s a…tool. It taps into this…this much bigger thing, so they can use it to shape space…to make it the way they want it.”
Dash looked at the others when Conover said the Lens was a small part of something much bigger. He wondered if Leira and Viktor had known any of this. From the growing amazement on their faces, they hadn’t. That was fine; he probably had much the same look on his face. When blowing up stars was a small part of something much bigger…
Dash raised a hand. “Okay. Wait.” He gestured at the Lens, in Leira’s hand. “That’s part of something a lot bigger?”
Conover nodded.
“So what, exactly, is this much bigger thing?”
“It’s not just one thing,” Conover said, his pale eyes going unfocused and looking far away. It looked like he was accessing information, as though reading it off a vid…which, based on how he’d described the lenses in his eyes, he probably pretty much was. “It’s one thing, and its many things. It’s like…there’s a lot of them, but they’re all connected somehow. They’re in one place…but it’s a huge place, the size of a star system. Bigger, even. And everything is orbiting everything else…”
Viktor narrowed his eyes. “Wait. Many things, orbiting each other, the size of a star system…”
“The Pasture,” Leira said.
Dash looked at her. “The place you found the Lens? Well, that makes sense, right? If the Lens was located there, and it was made by the Unseen for…well, whatever reason…then it would make sense that there’d be other things hidden there, too. I mean, we already talked about that, right? More of these Lenses in there—?”
“No,” Conover said. “You don’t get it. The Pasture isn’t just a place. It’s the…the much bigger thing. It was built to do…something. But each one of those…comets, asteroids, whatever they are…has a purpose. They’re all connected. And this Lens is connected them…and them to it…” The kid puffed out a frustrated sigh and shook his head. “It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to even understand. It’s…like trying to look at one piece of a ship at a time, and figure out what the whole ship looks like, how it all goes together, what it’s all for.”
Dash rubbed his chin. “Okay. So let’s summarize. This Pasture is one big construct, made by the Unseen, and everything in it is part of one big thing, and this Lens is just a small part of that big thing. So…there must be more Unseen tech in there.”
Conover looked at him. “You still don’t get it. The Pasture doesn’t contain Unseen tech. It is Unseen tech. The whole thing. The power there…it’s probably more power than the rest of the galaxy combined.”
Dash blinked. “More power…wait. Do you mean more power than, like, all of the civilizations in this galaxy combined? Or all of the stars and everything else, too?”
“The first for sure. The second…I don’t know. If it was all somehow activated, all at once…maybe?” Conover shook his head. “That’s one of those things I can’t really see. It’s just too big.”
“Yeah, but…” Dash took a moment to try and take in the implications. “If that’s all Unseen tech…like, millions of pieces of it—”
“It’s got millions of parts,” Conover cut in, “but it might really be one big thing—”
“Yeah, okay, fine. Anyway, whatever else it is, I know one thing it is for sure.”
“What’s that?” Viktor asked.
“Valuable.”
Leira curled her lip. “I think valuable is an understatement.”
“If this is what Conover says it is,” Viktor said, “it would be worth more than…well, there aren’t enough credits…could never be enough credits. And that ignores the fact it’s basically…well, again, based on what Conover is telling us…a whole star system, essentially made of alien technology. I don’t really think you can put a value on that.”
Dash crossed his arms. “I’d be willing to give it a try.”
Viktor frowned. “I think this is more a scientific discovery. Maybe the greatest one ever—”
“Oh?” Dash said, raising his eyebrows. “A scientific discovery? Really? Is that what why you and Leira went there? For science?”
Viktor’s frown deepened, but he looked down at the deck and shrugged. Leira, though, smiled.
“No,” she said, “of course not. Like I told you, we discovered some data that pointed at The Pasture as a place we might find some Unseen tech.” She hefted the Lens. “And we did…and, yes, we were interested in the credits we could make from it.” Her smiled faded. “But we had no idea that it was…well, what Conover’s telling us. We just thought it was a strange region of space…that the Unseen had created that artificial Oort Cloud for some obscure purpose, such as…well, maybe they wanted to live there, or something…”
She trailed off into a shrug. “What we didn’t think,” Leira went on, “was that it was all some huge Unseen…device, or whatever, and that it basically was alien tech.”
“Now that we know that,” Viktor said, “that…well, changes things, doesn’t it?”
Dash scratched an ear. “How?”
“Well…it’s not like we can just go back there and start ransacking the place.”
“Why not? It’s not like the Unseen are going to care, with them all being…you know, long dead…” But it was Dash’s turn to frown as something occurred to him. He turned to Conover. “They are all dead, aren’t they?”
The kid shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anything to say they weren’t, though.”
“Okay. Well. Let’s assume they are all dead. In that case, all of that tech…even a fraction of it would be priceless. Hell, that Lens you have is probably priceless. We could be…I don’t think rich even begins to describe it.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Leira said.
“What’s that?”
“Clan Shirna. Once you get past the Shadow Nebula, you’ve got them to contend with. They aren’t really that happy to have people trying to get through the Globe of Suns and into The Pasture. They do everything they can to stop it, in fact.”
Dash leaned against the bulkhead behind him. “Yeah…about that. Seems to me that you and Viktor managed to get in just fine. You got that Lens, and got most of the way out again.”
“The important part,” Viktor said, “being most of the way back out.”
“Uh-huh. But you managed to get past this Clan Shirna and into The Pasture. So, if they’re so dead set on keeping people out, how’d you manage that?”
“We had a cloak,” Leira said.
“A cloak. I’ve heard of them…they make electromagnetic energy wrap around a ship, right? Makes it so the ship just doesn’t seem to be there at all.” Dash gave an impressed nod. “Always wanted one of those. I mean, the Fade’s good, but it kinda limits what you can see in real space, and it burns fuel—”
“Yes, well, what a cloak doesn’t do is hide your own emissions,” Viktor said. “We could essentially coast into The Pasture, since we were going down a gravity well. Trouble is, we had to light the fusion drive to climb back out again. A cloak doesn’t do much to conceal a million-degree fusion exhaust plume.”
“Clan Shirna detected us right away,” Leira said. “We needed to get away, fast. Turned out they were faster. We tried to outrun them, but�
�”
“Yeah, I remember,” Dash said. “I was part of the aftermath of all that, remember?”
“But your Fade,” Viktor said, a musing look on his face, “is different. It translates you partway into unSpace. You still leave a footprint in real space, though, yes?”
Dash nodded. “Yeah…it’s called an echo. How big an echo depends on how far into unSpace you translate. Deeper means a smaller echo, but the downside is the deeper you go, the less you can see back into real space…”
He stopped as the implication of Viktor’s question set in. It hadn’t just been ide curiosity. “You want to go back into that Pasture, don’t you?”
Leira gave Dash a keen look. “Don’t you?”
“Well…yeah, as long as it was just all about piloting among those comets and shit. That, I can do. But this whole Clan Shirna thing…it’s a whole lot different when you’ve got someone gunning for you on top of everything else. I mean, do you remember how big that ship was? How many weapons it had?”
Viktor nodded. “Vividly.”
Conover looked up from wherever he and his strange eyes had been staring. “Why hasn’t this Clan Shirna already plundered this…Pasture? If it’s that full of Unseen tech—”
“Because of this,” Leira said, producing something from a pocket inside her utility vest. It was a small book, worn and shabby.
Dash frowned at it. “What’s that?”
“Clan Shirna’s holy book. Every member of the Clan carries it, lives by it, regardless of species.”
“Okay…and what does it say about the Pasture?”
“That anyone who even attempts to enter it must be put to death.”
Dash puffed out a sigh. “Well, I guess that rules out making a deal with them.”
7
Dash lay in his bunk, leafing through the Clan Shirna holy book. He’d encountered a lot of sacred treatises and the people motivated by them in his travels, from isolated, essentially nut-case sects with a few dozen members, to hugely sophisticated, system-spanning religions. He’d mostly ignored them all, except to the extent he could either benefit from them, or they got in his way. His own beliefs were…fuzzy. Sure, there might be bigger things out there, but the minute-to-minute grind of just getting by made it hard to really put much time into looking for them…
