—TWO HOURS LATER—
Chief Councilor Ellis called an emergency session of council as soon as he was released from hospital. Not long after that, gravity was restored to all of Astralis, with the exception of Fallside, where it was being ramped up very slowly to prevent more damage from falling debris.
Tyra took a quantum junction up to the Council chambers at the zenith of the artificial sky, on Level One, directly above Hubble Mountain. The room had a heavily reinforced and shielded glass floor, giving an unparalleled view of all four cities on the surface below (as well as a bad case of vertigo).
Tyra reached the double-story golden doors of the room to find a full platoon of Marine bots and their sergeant guarding the entrance. She stopped in front of them and waited while a pair of bots scanned her from head to toe. Ellis wasn’t taking any chances after what had happened on the bridge.
The doors swung wide, revealing a vast chamber, and Tyra sucked in a shuddery breath. Even after all these years, the chamber still inspired awe and fear. The glass floor made every step feel like her last, while the dome-shaped, star-studded ceiling reminded her how much more there was to the universe than this tiny speck they called Astralis.
Tyra headed for her chair, empty and hovering above the glass floor. All of the other councilors had already arrived—one from each of the surface level cities, as well as another eight—four for the districts in the fifteen hundred levels above the surface, and four for the sub-districts in the fifteen hundred levels below.
The councilors sat on floating grav chairs around the circumference of the chamber, thirteen in all counting Tyra, but this time the circle was wider than usual with the addition of extra chairs for Admiral Stavos and General Graves, seated on either side of Ellis. There were also two strangers in the center of the chamber: a woman sitting on a grav chair with her back turned to Tyra, and the other, a doctor in a white lab coat standing beside her with a gurney full of medical equipment.
As Tyra took her seat, her gaze flicked back to the woman in the center of the room. That woman was dressed in a naval officer’s white uniform, and her black shoulder boards were marked with the four white bars and golden star of a captain’s insignia. If that wasn’t enough to identify her, the woman also had familiar raven black hair, tied up in a bun at the back of her head.
“Thank you for joining us,” Ellis said, with a hint of annoyance at Tyra’s tardiness. She was twenty minutes late—Lucien’s fault. He’d insisted she finish lunch with him and the girls before she left. “Council is now in session,” Ellis said. “First on the agenda, we have—”
“What’s she doing here?” Tyra demanded, pointing to the woman in the center of the circle.
The woman turned around, her grav chair rotating soundlessly. One look at her face confirmed Tyra’s suspicions about her identity. “Way to make a woman feel welcome. I believe we spoke earlier on the comms, Madam Councilor.”
Tyra nodded slowly. “A lot has happened since then.”
Her clone nodded back. “I got the summary from a nurse after I woke up.”
“If you’re both done trading pleasantries, we have some serious issues on the agenda,” Ellis said.
“What is she doing here?” Tyra asked again.
“She is the sole surviving witness of first contact with the Faros, so it’s fair to say she knows more about them than any of us, and hopefully, she also knows something more of what they want.”
“They want to make us all their slaves,” Tyra’s clone said.
“Captain Forster, please hold your answers until the probe has been initiated,” Ellis said.
“Sorry,” the captain replied.
“You’re subjecting her to a mind probe,” Tyra said, noting now that the doctor standing beside Captain Forster was actually a probe technician.
“It’s the only way we can be sure she’s telling the truth. Doctor Exeter, you may start whenever you’re ready.”
The doctor nodded, and took a moment to configure his probe machine on the gurney beside Captain Forster. The probe would be conducted via her AR implant, so no invasive mechanisms or scanners were required, just programming one machine to talk to another. When he was finished, he turned to Captain Forster and said, “Please lay back and count backward from ten.”
Captain Forster reclined her chair and began counting. “Ten, nine, eight...” When she reached five, she stopped talking, and her eyes glazed over. She stared fixedly at the stars shining down from the ceiling.
“She’s ready, Chief Councilor,” Doctor Exeter said.
“Good. Miss Forster, please tell us exactly what happened during first contact with the Faros. Don’t leave anything out.”
The captain explained how they’d landed on a jungle world and found a holographic history of a race of sentient spiders. The history depicted them being enslaved by a sentient humanoid race, and it marked the planet where they’d been taken. Captain Forster and her crew had decided to follow them and meet the slavers. The slavers’ fleet was waiting for them when they arrived, and one of the humanoid aliens contacted them, speaking in Versal. He claimed his name was Lucien and that his people were called Faros. The alien asked to meet with the crew of the Inquisitor on the surface of the planet where his fleet was orbiting. They agreed to meet with him, whereupon Faro-Lucien explained who the Faros were and all about their long history with Etherus and the Etherians.
Apparently the Faros had been created by Etherus to be the army of Etheria. Back at the beginning of the universe they’d argued for the creation of a free, chaotic universe, while Etherus and the majority of the Etherians had envisioned a paradise like Etheria. The Faros insisted on a vote, and the majority decided in favor of paradise, but the Faros hadn’t been allowed to participate in the vote. Feeling overruled, they started the Great War and tried to take over Etheria for themselves. The entire galaxy of Etheria was decimated by the war, but the Faros lost that war, and the Etherians exiled them beyond the Red Line.
With the majority of the universe at their disposal, the Faros went on to create the free, chaotic place they’d envisioned—except their idea of freedom was to enslave all other sentient races, including a green-skinned caste of their own people, making them the only free beings in the universe. When Captain Forster raised objections to the Faros’ selective application of freedom, and indicated that she and her crew were leaving, Faro-Lucien gleefully informed them that they could not leave because he’d decided to make them slaves of the Farosien Empire, too. They’d barely escaped with their lives, and two of them had been killed.
They successfully fled in their ship, evading the Faros; but the aliens repeatedly chased them until they finally realized they had a spy in their midst. They managed to extract the timer implants that should have killed them after a month by making first contact with a friendly species of what they assumed to be higher-dimensional beings.
Soon after that, the entire crew submitted themselves to stasis, obviating the need to find the spy and leaving their navigator bot at the helm to guide them to Astralis’s destination at the cosmic horizon. When they arrived, they arranged for a rendezvous with Astralis, thinking that they’d left the Faros far behind them, but of course, that hadn’t been the case.
Councilor Ellis leaned back in his hovering chair and folded his hands in front of his mouth, both forefingers pressed to his lips as if to shush anyone who might dare to interrupt his thoughts.
Tyra nodded slowly to herself. This was all consistent with what they’d already learned.
Ellis stopped making the shushing gesture. “Quite an elaborate tale, Captain, but I suppose we can’t doubt any of what you’ve said, since you’re under the influence of a probe. It sounds to me like there’s no case for misconduct here. The Faros are slavers; when you refused to condone their culture, they decided to subject you to it.”
Captain Forster gave no reply, since no one had asked her a direct question.
“There is one other matter that n
eeds answering, and I’m afraid this one is far more serious. You had a spy on board the Inquisitor. I understand that even after waking from stasis you took appropriate measures to isolate the crew from the Inquisitor’s systems, but somehow the spy still managed to give away your location. Is that correct, Miss Forster?”
“Yes.”
“Did you learn who the spy was?”
“We did.”
“And who was that spy?”
“Pandora, our nav bot. She confessed soon after the Faros arrived at the rendezvous.”
“The bot gave you away?” Ellis sounded surprised. “Was it infected with a virus?”
“In a way.”
“And you didn’t consider the possibility sooner? You should have scanned the bot for alterations to its code.”
“We did, but the scans came back clean,” Captain Forster replied.
“Then how did the Faros turn your navigator into a spy?” Ellis asked.
“While we were making first contact with the Faros, they apparently slipped a data probe aboard the Inquisitor and made physical contact with Pandora. They managed to insert another layer to her programming that we were unable to detect, a kind of multiple personality lurking below the level of her primary programming, which was able to take control whenever it liked.”
“I see. Then none of the human or alien crew were responsible for the Faros finding us.”
“No.”
“And the Faros followed you for eight years? Why didn’t they ambush you sooner? While Pandora was at the helm and everyone was in stasis it would have been easy to capture the ship.”
“Their goal was to get to Astralis. They were using the Inquisitor as bait. And they didn’t follow us for eight years. The Farosien Empire appears to span the entire universe beyond the Red Line, so they simply sent the nearest fleet to intercept us once Pandora alerted them to our location.”
Silence fell in the council chamber.
After a few moments of digesting what Captain Forster had said, Ellis spoke in a hushed voice: “You’re telling me that they have an empire spanning tens of billions of light years in all directions?”
“That is what Pandora implied.”
“The bot told you this?”
“We asked how and why they followed us after eight years, and she confirmed that they didn’t have to follow us, because the Farosien Empire is just that big.”
The councilor of Winterside, Corvin Romark, blew out a breath and shook his head. “Then we don’t stand a chance against them!”
“I think that’s a given,” General Graves added. “Look how much trouble they caused on Astralis with just a few hundred soldiers. That proves that even if we had equal numbers, we’d lose.”
“Yes, that seems to be the problem...” Chief Councilor Ellis agreed. “So we avoid contact with the Faros. It’s a big universe. We did it for eight years already after our first battle with them. And if it weren’t for the Inquisitor leading them straight to us, we probably would have gone unmolested for another eight years—or even eight hundred!”
Tyra nodded her agreement, as did several of the other councilors.
Ellis was making that shushing gesture again. Apparently lost in thought contemplating their situation.
They’d established strict safety protocols ever since their first meeting with the Faros had almost resulted in the destruction of Astralis.
The protocols called for sending out disposable probes ahead of Astralis, using them to scan for safe systems. If a probe detected unknown alien starships or technology, it would self-destruct immediately and never live to tell Astralis about it. (They couldn’t risk comm signals being detected and tracked back to either the probe or to Astralis, so comms silence was one of the safety protocols.) If, on the other hand, a probe encountered an uninhabited system, it would jump back to Astralis and report its findings. Astralis would then review the safe systems marked by its probes and pick the one they thought was least likely to result in contact with an advanced alien race.
It was a practically fool-proof system, but one which left little room for exploration along the way. They did get to explore the systems that Astralis jumped to, but all those barren rocks, frozen ice balls, gas giants, and toxic wastelands blurred together over time.
“Doctor Exeter, you may end the probe and wake the patient. Thank you for your assistance,” Councilor Ellis said, having apparently returned from whatever far off place his thoughts had taken him.
The doctor nodded and set about terminating the mind probe. Captain Forster’s head lolled to one side and her eyes fluttered shut. The doctor pushed Captain Forster’s grav chair from the room, and his hover gurney floated along behind him like an obedient pet.
Once they were gone, Chief Councilor Ellis sat forward in his chair. “Next on the agenda... what do we do about the Faros we captured? Almost half of the ones we thought we killed later came back to life during their autopsies. Two of which escaped and were subsequently killed. We’re keeping the surviving prisoners sedated in a maximum security prison, since we can’t figure out how to disarm them.”
“Do we even know how to kill them?” Corvin Romark from Winterside asked.
“The surest way seems to be by cutting off their heads,” Ellis replied.
“Then I move that we behead them all before one of them escapes and finds a way to call for help.”
“I second the motion,” Councilor Kato S’var of District One said; half his face was still bandaged from third degree burns he’d suffered during the fighting.
Ellis shook his head. “They’re too valuable alive. If we can find some way of getting inside their heads, we’ll be able to find out exactly what we’re up against—maybe even which systems are safe for us to travel to, and which ones aren’t.”
“I agree...” Tyra added slowly. It was a risky proposition, and Tyra wasn’t entirely sure it was the right move, but Ellis had a point: they couldn’t afford to pass up the chance to learn something from the prisoners. “We keep them sedated and double their security.”
“We need to vote on it,” Romark said. “All in favor of executing the Faro prisoners?”
Six councilors raised their hands.
“All against?” Ellis asked.
Seven raised their hands, including Ellis himself.
“Then we keep them alive,” Ellis said.
Romark’s eyes narrowed, but he held his tongue.
“Moving on...” Ellis began. “We need to decide our course of action going forward. Do we press on to the new cosmic horizon, or do we turn back and return to the Etherian Empire?”
The councilors voiced their opinions, all of them talking over one another.
Ellis waved a hand for silence, and called on them one at a time, in clockwise fashion, to voice their arguments.
“The mission was to reach the cosmic horizon,” Corvin Romark said, when it was his turn to speak. He shrugged his broad shoulders. “We’ve already done that. It’s time to go home.”
Tyra gaped at him. Unable to wait her turn, she blurted out, “We’ve only begun to explore! Thirty billion light years from here is a big stretch of empty space that we’ve never even conceived of. What is that emptiness? What caused it? For all we know it’s the physical edge of the universe, and anything that goes beyond that point drops off into another dimension! Or maybe it really is just empty space. If so, we don’t know how far that emptiness extends, or even if it is a uniform phenomena that surrounds the universe on all sides. It could be like a lake, or an ocean, and on the other side of it is another part of the universe. Our real mission was to explore and to learn the true nature of the universe, not simply to reach one horizon and stop there. We’ve only just begun our mission, and at this point, home is even farther away than the Big Empty ahead of us.”
“But one direction will take us deeper into enemy territory, and the other will return us to safe harbor,” Corvin replied.
“Romark is right,” one of the district
councilors put in. “Safety should be our primary concern right now.”
Tyra shook her head. “There’s no guarantee that we’ll be safe if we return home, or that we won’t be if we press on, and we only have the word of a spy to say that the Farosien Empire really does span the entire universe beyond the Red Line. It might have been a lie, designed to intimidate us so we wouldn’t try to resist. Just because we can’t conceive of a race so dogged that they would follow us for eight years doesn’t mean they aren’t, in fact, that obsessed with us. The Faros are immortals, and by all indications they’ve always been immortals, which means that they’ve been alive for billions of years. Eight years is a blip to them, as insignificant as a second would be to us. Time is relative. These Faros could be extremely patient beings.”
Several councilors murmured their agreement with that, and a few of the ones who’d come out in favor of turning back looked thoughtful, as if they might be reconsidering their opinions.
“Don’t you want to know what else is out there?” Tyra pressed.
“But that’s just the thing,” Councilor Romark said. “We can’t afford to explore very much along the way, so there’s only so much we can learn. We’ve been forced to jump to uninhabited systems for the past eight years, treating all alien races as if they were equally hostile.”
“What if we change that?” Tyra asked. “Instead of sending out disposable probes to clear a path for Astralis, we could send out galleons again, like we used to.”
“And just look where that got us!” Romark boomed.
“It’s too dangerous,” councilor Gavin Luprine from Summerside added, shaking his head.
Tyra frowned, and Ellis held up a hand to forestall further argument. “I have been thinking a lot about the problem of exploring safely over the years, and I believe there is a way to do what Councilor Ortane is suggesting without putting ourselves at risk. We could use our galleons in the same way we currently use disposable probes.”
Councilor Romark shook his head. “How? We can do that with probes because they’re automated—if we lose one, it’s no big deal, so we can afford to have them self-destruct at the first sign of trouble. Besides, if we change our criteria for what constitutes trouble and allow manned expeditions to inhabited systems, we won’t know what kind of trouble we’re in until it’s too late. We’ll be opening the door for exactly the same kind of ambush that the Inquisitor brought to us. Maybe it won’t be the Faros this time, but it will be someone, sooner or later.”
Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within Page 14
