by Mel Keegan
She was in complete agreement. “I’d be happier if a shift was an hour … split the diff, call it 90 minutes, tops. You use your time, then you drop what you’re doing and head back in. If you can find a punctuation point at 80 minutes and be back in the suiting room here in 90, so much the better. Richard?”
“There’s your ground rule, people. You’ll be on the clock, and Joss will be nagging you from the 60 minute mark.” Vaurien was as firm as any salvage skipper who had seen too many industrial accidents caused by fatigue, confusion, cold, heat, toxicity. “Don’t start anything after the 60 minute mark. You have 20 minutes to finish up what you’re doing, and you bug out at 80. No ifs, ands or buts. Mark – choose your team.”
Lai’a said evenly, “Standby for drive ignition test. Three. Two. One –”
A jolt through the hull, the familiar feeling of falling, and a thrumming vibration which smoothed out almost at once. Marin’s middle ear was learning to cope and this time the dizziness was mild.
“Drive alignment is 98.8%” Lai’a reported. “Adequate.”
“But not optimum,” Mark observed. “Find the reason for the dissonance, Lai’a, and report. If you can’t resolve it, find out why you can’t resolve it. We want an error factor of less than 0.7% before we proceed to the Orion Gate. Major problems, unanswerable questions, we head right back to Alshie’nya.”
“Of course, Doctor Sherratt.” Lai’a sounded mildly surprised. “However, an error factor of 1.2% in no way impedes engine function. Do you wish to transit the temporal horizon at this time?”
Electricity seemed to crackle through the Ops room. Mark and Richard looked levelly at one another before they conferred with Jazinsky, and when all three agreed with a mute nod, Vaurien said,
“Go head, Lai’a.”
“Proceeding to the Ebrezjim Lagoon.” Lai’a could have been announcing the time or weather. “Time to transit is two minutes.”
“Your team, Mark?” Vaurien said quietly.
Jazinsky was there at once. “Me.”
But Mark shook his head. “No. We can’t both be in the field at once. Both senior scientists? Unwise. And I have to go – it’s Resalq tech, very little older than I am myself, not to mention that one of my grandparents was aboard. It’s almost a point of honor for me to be there. Dario and Tor have spent most of their adult lives taking ancient technology to pieces, so if anyone can get into the AI core of the Ebrezjim, they can. Midani Kulich was a tech by trade, not long after the days when the ship was new. He’s familiar with systems we’ve only studied as reconstructions. Neil and Curtis have volunteered … give me two from Bravo to back them up. Curtis, I want you on environmental monitoring. Neil, wrangle the drones. We’ll have six with us, including two viddrones, plus two heavy Arago sleds. Two hands from Bravo will monitor comm and safety protocols, and I’d like one of the Bravo people to be Tim Inosanto, the unit medic.” He paused there and looked speculatively at Rabelais and Queneau. “Ernst, you were the last person to actually work on this ship, and I know you almost died here. You know exactly the condition of the wreck. Would you be up for this, you and Jo?”
They answered at once. “Yes,” Rabelais said too quickly.
“Thought you’d never bloody ask.” Queneau gave Vidal an apologetic glance. “Sorry, Mick. You’ll be there next time.”
“I can wrangle comm and data, right here.” Vidal gestured at the workstation at left of the tank. “Joss, bring Comm 4 online.”
“Transit in twenty seconds,” Lai’a announced.
With a start, Marin turned back to the display. The temporal horizon was no longer a recognizable ovoid, it was a wall, and if it was the same kind of horizon as the shell of a stasis chamber, it would seem harder, denser, even than Zunshu armor. Lai’a was driving toward it until it announced, “Transit in ten seconds,” and the hyper-Weimann unit shut down. All vibration through the deck ceased. The ship could have been gliding over smooth ice.
“Christ.” Vidal’s right hand covered the place on his chest where he wore the Daku tattoo.
“You did this,” Jazinsky whispered. “Burned out the drive on the Orpheus, and –”
“Transit in three. Two. One,” Lai’a intoned.
Jazinsky might have been about to ask if they should expect a bow shock, but if a hull the size of the Orpheus could bear the impact, Lai’a would shrug it off. Marin consciously braced himself with the apparent mass of his body and the armor set at 150 kilos. He took a breath, held it as Lai’a counted through one.
Nothing. A faint lurch, as if a river current had picked up a small boat floating into it, before even this levelled out. In the navtank, the display seemed to turn off.
And then, “Transit complete,” Lai’a reported. “Passage through the radiation field, 1.04 seconds measured by onboard clocks. Commencing decontamination procedures. Estimated time to restore safe radiation levels, 55 minutes. Drones deploying; estimate 200 drones will be contaminated beyond salvage point. Manufacture of replacement drones has commenced.”
“That’s a fraction of the radiation you came home to Alshie’nya with, Lai’a, when you brought back the Orpheus-Odyssey.” Travers looked from Mark to Jazinsky and back.
“Because transit time at high velocity via a Heisenberg tunnel was very brief, according to onboard clocks,” Lai’a said with ultimate patience. “Time required to extract the Orpheus-Odyssey from the temporal horizon was 82.4 minutes, due to the extreme caution of the extraction. More powerful Arago tractors placed excessive stress on the frame of the driftship. I would have broken it before it was free of the horizon.”
The glittering, coruscating vista in the navtank had flared first into every shade of orange and red and then lapsed swiftly into a black so dense, it might have been the interior of an undiscovered tomb. Yet when Marin glanced at the instruments he saw the hardware was still working perfectly. Space around them was simply black, and Vidal’s face was a granite mask.
“This is … it?” Vaurien asked of the veterans.
“Oh, yeah.” Vidal hugged himself. “No stars. No nothing. And from what we know, now, so little time we almost can’t measure it. Just cold and dark and nothing. I came to call it the pit of hell.”
Vaurien’s brow creased. “Lai’a, chronometers?”
“Shiptime is perceived as normal to those aboard, including myself,” Lai’a told him. “I have no way to measure the passage of time beyond the temporal horizon, and too many variables are presented by the logs of the Orpheus and Odyssey to make speculation sensible, or even possible. Recommend comparison between shiptime chronometers and the transmission from the beacon deployed at the Orpheus Gate, upon exit from the Ebrezjim Lagoon.”
“Agreed.” Mark considered the dead black display for a long moment and then turned his back on it. “Hyper-Weimann capability?”
“The transspace drive is functional and available.” Lai’a paused. “Deep scan of the accessible region is complete. Sensors register over twelve thousand traces.”
“Twelve – thousand?” Travers’s head came up.
“Those are the objects within range of my scan platforms,” Lai’a amended. “I have no doubt that if I were to chart this entire void, an order of magnitude more traces would pass into resolution range.”
“But we never lost so many ships in the Drift,” Travers protested.
“Nor did the Resalq – at least, not that we know of.” Mark pulled a chair up to the nearest workstation. “Show me what you have.”
Data began to stream and Lai’a added, “Many traces are comparatively small. Some may be wreckage broken off larger vessels due to collision. All traces are drifting on inertia; occasional collision is inevitable.”
“And some of those wrecks,” Dario said grimly, “are bound to be Zunshu. Makes sense, doesn’t it? They’ll lose one now and then, same as we all do.”
Leaning on Mark’s shoulder, Jazinsky raked the white-blonde hair back from her face. “There’s one other thing. We’ve physically
seen the Orion Gate from here. Who knows what other civilizations are using the space around it? A lot of the ships in this graveyard are going to be neither ours nor Zunshu.”
Alexis Rusch had been quiet for some time, like the Sherratts content to immerse herself in the culmination of a lifetime’s work. “If there are humans and Resalq around Hellgate, it stands to reason there’s at least one civilization around the Orion Gate – if I’m remembering correctly, there was, and it’s been pulverized. Mark, the Aenestra found the remnants of numerous Zunshu strikes around Orion 359.”
“Unmistakable signs of Zunshu activity,” Mark affirmed. “Gravity weapons, wholesale devastation, worlds with their atmosphere ripped away, continent-sized craters where cities once stood. The devastation was so complete, we were unable to get any hint of what or who the victims had been. We could only make informed speculation, and not much of that.”
“Yes.” Jazinsky was nodding slowly, still running the data. “The Zunshu only ever attack worlds with civilization, industry … intelligent species, at any rate. There’s no record of them every striking a world where the highest level of development was, say, arboreal primates or Cetacea, much less forms like cattle, horses, bears wolves, whatever. The Zunshu definitely key on the noise and filth of industrialization.”
“The Resalq,” Rusch mused, “were hit only after they deliberately introduced themselves to ‘the enemy.’ It’s safe to assume the Zunshu didn’t know Mark’s people existed, until they made themselves known. Later, humans were hammered in the same way as the Resalq survivors – again, we’re a highly technical civilization capable of e-space travel. The question is…”
“The question is,” Leon Sherratt went on, “do the Zunshu strike only spacefaring civilizations? Or would they also investigate the noise and pollution of, say, a pre-space culture which had achieved nuclear fission? And if they did, would they raze such a culture right back to dust?”
“But, why would they do that?” Jon Kim might not be able to make sense of the raw data, but he could grasp the concepts. “I suppose I can halfway understand them striking through the Drift and destroying planets, people who’re out here, seizing worlds, making a mess in a patch of space that maybe the Zunshu regard as their own; but why in any world would they punch down a culture that hadn’t even dragged its way into space yet?”
“Maybe to stop them ever doing it,” Vidal suggested.
“And as for the Deep Sky being Zunshu territory,” Leon added, “in all the decades of exploring and excavating across both sides of the frontier, we never found a stick of evidence to suggest the bastards ever did anything here at all – not one brick standing on top of another with their signature, a recognizable mark of ownership, whatever.”
These were thoughts Mark had entertained long ago, Marin knew. Give him cognac and a hearthside on a night where the snow was falling deep and soft over Riga, and he would spin complex theories of civilization’s rise and downfall, rich with the cadence of ancient, classical myth. “The truth is, we just don’t know,” he was saying to Leon. “In our own history, a vessel would visit a world, drop a marker beacon … a millennium before, a sailing vessel would visit another continent and hoist a flag.
“Those explorers would claim the new land for their clan or nation, and sail away. In a few years, along comes a storm and shreds the flag, demolishes it. Or in a century an asteroid collides with the beacon, obliterating it. No trace of the original claim would be apparent, yet back at home the clan, the nation, remains quite satisfied it owns the disputed territory. Fast-forward another century … an upstart nation or species arrives in this same territory. These new pioneers see nothing to stop them hoisting their own flags – and these people actually go ahead and colonize. Soon, it’s all agriculture and industry – and very probably war, as soon as the original ‘owner’ becomes aware of what’s going on.”
Marin had heard this theory from Mark before. “So the Resalq and the Zunshu have been in a territory dispute. Humans blundered in, and – what? The Zunshu never even bothered to give us fair warning to git.”
“Perhaps,” Dario said tersely, “they’re so alien, so different, they can’t tell humans and Resalq apart. Look at us: oxygen breathing, endothermic, two meters give or take a little, bipedal, binocular, mammalian. Sure, very different body temperatures, organ and brain structures, hormones, chromosomes … for a start, you humans even have two genders, which most of us still think of as insanely bizarre. But none of these details would be apparent at a glance.”
“The similarities between us really are barely skin deep,” Jazinsky protested, “and any species that can master the gravity express obviously has access to sophisticated biological scan gear. They point a hunk of hardware at me, and then at Richard, and then at Mark, and they read three recognizable genders, male, female and you; plus two distinct DNA blueprints. They’d know inside ten seconds, one bunch of us is double-gendered with half a chromosome set apiece, and you guys are not even from the same planet, not with that weird-ass DNA of yours.”
“So why,” Vaurien reasoned, “did the Zunshu just pick up the hammer and start in on us humans when we showed our odd-looking faces in this neck of the woods? Why didn’t they at least park a comm beacon out here, broadcasting a nasty ‘Keep out, this means you’ message along with a cipher key to crack the language? Any intelligent, territorial species would have done that.” His head was shaking in a slow negative. “Sorry, Mark, I’m not buying this one. You’re hypothesizing a species so bloody territorial, they’ll commit outright xenocide to protect a region of space they don’t even want to make use of over the span of more than a thousand years … but they won’t go to the trouble of marking it with a beacon?”
“That kind of territoriality goes back to the days when all our ancestors, human and Resalq, were so primitive, they had fangs as long as your thumb,” Vidal added. “They used to scent-mark their patch of the forest or savannah, and they’d fight to the death to defend it. I’ll certainly agree, a species could master the gravity express and still harbor the kind of territoriality of wolves in the timberland – and sure, they’d be freakin’ paranoid about their borders. But that’s the whole point. As soon as the Resalq started to reach out, you’d have run face-first into the beacons. You’d have been chased right back to your own home system, first time you sent out an interstellar probe.”
In fact, Mark could only agree. “This is the bottom line I reach every time I run the theory. It’s actually good to have the argument confirmed by consensus. Which,” he said darkly, “leaves us not one whit closer to understanding the Zunshu! We know a few more things, for what they’re worth: they never seem to send a manned ship. Every deployment is about drones, either drone vessels, or ‘smart’ weapons like the one intended for Borushek, or semi-aware automata which were designed to look like – well, like you, Midani.”
The ancient Resalq had been standing well back, listening with a fierce concentration. Tonio Teniko was lurking behind him, dark eyed and inexpressive, monitoring, digesting, adding nothing; but Midani was struggling with the language, with every bit of resolve he could muster.
He was busy with a handy, every moment, running unfamiliar words. Marin could only admire him for the determination. The Resalq was in loose slacks, a blue-gold tunic baggy enough about him to disguise his different body morphology, and the bare, elongated Resalq skull was wrapped in a dark emerald bandanna. He was trying to blend in, and part of Marin had begun to wish he would not. Midani was not merely Resalq, he was ancestral – he should celebrate his heritage, not try to hide it.
He stepped closer now, between Mark and Dario, with whom he most often worked. “What I can be telling to you, you not already knowing? I seen plenty Zunshu machine. Too much Zunshu machine. Never Zunshu … not living, alive, thing, real, uh …” His double thumbs flew over keypad. “Creature,” he finished. “Never Zunshu live creature, like Resalq, like human, be living.”
“Oh, we know what you
mean, Mid,” Dario assured him. “And – think back to history class, in school. Do you remember any mention, anywhere, anytime, of the early Resalq space explorers finding a marker, a buoy, a beacon … jin, debai roresclal, sem?”
“Semsem.” Midani began to nod and then changed the gesture to a shake of his head. The ancestrals nodded ‘no’ and shook their heads ‘yes.’ All else was learned from humans and practiced deliberately in the interests of communication. “Never found, no. No beacon, no marker. Obusem – nothing.”
“There – Midani just made my point exactly.” Vidal’s slim shoulders lifted in a shrug. “A territorial instinct strong enough to inspire a race of people to commit xenocide would send the bastards out pissing on trees – well, posting marker buoys, anyway.”
“Research,” Rusch said flatly. “Mark, Richard, we’re not going to know more till we get through to the Orion Gate and take another look at the ruins.” She frowned at Mark. “Lai’a, do you have the research returned by the Resalq expedition to Orion 359?”
“Of course, Colonel Rusch.” Lai’a paused. “To which workstation would you like the data streamed?”
She spread her hands. “Richard, any preferences?”
“Joss, bring Comm 4 online.” Vaurien thrust both hands into the pockets of black denims. “Leon, you want to go through it?”
“I’ve seen it twenty times,” Leon protested.
“Not with me, you haven’t.” Rusch had her teeth into the job. “A new perspective. A fresh pair of eyeballs. But I’ll need Resalq input. It’s an ocean of data, and I’ve never seen any of it.”
“All right.” Leon groaned expressively.
