Valyien Boxed Set 3

by James David Victor

  “I don’t understand…” Cassandra said. “Stars are obscured by light pollution, barriers, or atmosphere.” But there was no roil or miasma of clouds above her. Did that mean that they were inside something? A black dome of some kind?

  “And, uh… Cass?” Eliard wasn’t looking up at the mystery above but was instead casting around behind them.

  “What is it?” She could hear the worry in his voice.

  “Well, the only time I have used the Valyien warp gates before, they took me to another warp gate…one under Branton, actually.”

  “Planet Branton? Your home world?” Cassandra said quickly. “There’s no Imperial Coalition record of any archaeological Valyien sites there…”

  “Yeah, long story, but I think that there’s good evidence to suggest that the Coalition is seeded with them. Anyway.” Eliard shook his head as if it wasn’t as important as what he had to get off his chest, right now. “Always a warp gate. The warp plasma was always contained within the gate, like a circle, sometimes with pillars as well…”

  “Okay…” Cassandra nodded slowly, trying to see where he was going with this.

  Eliard looked at her in alarm. “Well? Where’s the warp circle? Where are the pillars?” He spread out his Device arm and wheeled it around the available scenery.

  There was nothing. No difference in any of the features that Cassandra could see, anywhere near them. No sign of a perfectly-inscribed circle, and no standing pillars like at Esther, and no caught bubble of warp plasma, dangerously swirling to itself in a constant, impossible interplay.

  Well, no signs apart from the ones etched all over the surface of this planet, Cassandra thought.

  And no black stone warp pillars aside from every stack, rock, chimney, and outcrop of rock that she could see for miles in every direction…

  “By the void…” she gasped, as the pirate confirmed what she had been thinking.

  “I think that this whole place is a warp gate…” he said, and his voice sounded small compared to the enormity of what he was saying.

  “But how is that even possible?” Cassandra said.

  “Who knows with the Valyien? How is any of it possible at all?” Eliard shook his head, thinking furiously. “I concentrated on going back to where it began.”

  “Where what began?” Cassie asked.

  “The Valyien. The warp gates. All of the danger that we’ve been facing,” he said, swallowing nervously. “You know what… I’ve got a feeling that this place, wherever this might be, is the home world of the Valyien themselves…”

  Flash! Suddenly, something changed on the horizon. There was a light, small but intensely bright compared to the dark sky. Cassie gasped at the sudden intrusion, and they turned to watch a flaring ball of light ascend from behind a rocky wall, throwing deep shadows as it climbed higher and higher—like a rocket, or a meteorite seen in reverse.

  The light ascended higher and higher into the dark void, growing steadily smaller as it did so.

  “It’s leaving the planet…” Eliard muttered, and Cassandra had to agree, as she saw the light slowly describe an ever fainter and fainter arc across the sky. That, she knew, was one of the signs of a ship or a rocket or a drone leaving a planet’s gravity well. Planets were, by definition and the forces of gravity, circular, so any object moving in a fixed trajectory—straight up or straight out—always looked as though it was curving to the eyes of someone on the planet’s surface.

  The light grew smaller and smaller, but remained hard and bright, and didn’t twinkle as most normal rockets or drones did as they passed through layers of atmosphere.

  Another flash, and suddenly a flare of bluish light spread out from the ever-decreasing star, fading as it did so.

  “Was that a rocket burn?” Cassie asked, before Eliard disagreed.

  “No. That was that object leaving a very light meson field…” he said, and Cassandra instinctively knew that he was right. Mesons could be generated and held in varying static charges to create forcefields and particle beams capable of cutting through solid metal if another energy was given to them, but at their lightest levels, they would merely act as a containment or a decontamination field.

  And they would keep everything inside of it pressured… Cassandra swore.

  “We’re inside a meson field. That’s why there’s no apparent atmosphere, but there is still gravity. We’re inside a massive containment zone—maybe this whole planet is!”

  “Holy crap…” Eliard said, though not because it was technically impossible. Various parts of the Imperial Coalition did similar things themselves anyway, with the metal moonlet that was Armcore Prime having an encircling meson field maintained and projected by a few thousand satellite drones, as well as a few habitats using meson fields as domes over their docking ports to make the complicated procedure of spaceships docking and departing that much easier…

  But an entire world? the pirate found himself thinking. A world that was big enough to have its own gravity, clearly. That would mean an insane amount of satellite drones necessary to produce and constantly maintain the meson field. Either that, or the energy source available to the Valyien had to be incredible. Far more than even the Helion Generator. Eliard thought of the constantly-moving energy station that collected energy from a binary star system back in the Imperial Coalition.

  The departing star, or ship, or whatever it had been was now just a faint dot that moved across the curve of the sky. It was outside this planet’s meson field… Eliard frowned. “Hey, I thought the reason that we couldn’t see any stars was because there was a meson field in the way…” he said out loud. “How come we can still see that, then?”

  Cassandra murmured that she didn’t know, until the light grew so faint that it was hard to track at all—

  And then it happened.

  There was an almighty light that lit up the sky like the wrath of god.

  “Gah!” Both Eliard and Cassandra staggered, clutching at their eyes. It was like watching a supernova, only not so violent, and there were no boiling clouds of gases.

  Within micro-seconds, the light had retracted, thinning into a narrow curve that spread out across the entire hemisphere, like…

  Like it had hit the edge of something… Cassandra was thinking. Light traveling in a curving arc around something, and then flashing out into darkness.

  What did that remind her of?

  “No way,” Cassandra said.

  With the after-glare of the light explosion, and the subsequent arc of light still etched into their minds as securely as the Valyien sigils were etched into the rocks beneath their feet, it was hard for Eliard to ignore the validity of what Cassandra was saying.

  “Hawking radiation,” the House Archival agent said once again.

  “Go on.” Eliard nodded.

  “When energy hits a black hole, it is torn apart and sucked past the point of no return, to the singularity at the heart of the black hole, right?” the agent said. “It was always assumed that no energy could escape a black hole, that it was transmuted and translated into something else…”

  “Somewhere else,” the captain added dourly.

  “Well, back sometime in Old Earth history, an astrophysicist successfully proved that wasn’t the case with pure energy, with the highest concentrations of sub-atomic particles,” Cassandra explained. “When the particles hit the black hole, they get scattered just as you saw, in a decreasing arc around the event horizon as their energy becomes spent, and they fall into the singularity, but one very unique and very particular band of energy is thrown back.”

  Eliard watched as she made a pulling apart gesture with her two fists.

  “That Hawking radiation is insanely powerful. Something that is capable of escaping a black hole. If you could harness it, if you could capture it…”

  “That’d explain what’s powering the meson field, then…” Eliard nodded. “The Valyien have parked this world right outside an active black hole, and the meson field stops i
t from being sucked in, and they are harvesting the Hawking radiation from it…”

  That was it, Eliard knew. “That was where the Valyien began. Where their terrible warp gates began. Here. With that.” He nodded to the blackened sky above them.

  “So, all we got to do now is…work out how to turn it off!”

  It was a harder proposal than he had thought, especially when he heard himself say the words out loud in the strange night.

  The flashes that ascended into the dark sky, broke the meson field, and hit the distant black hole occurred every hour or so, from what Eliard could figure. It gave them a regular source of light, as well as a destination to head to.

  As soon as the pair had figured out what they had to do, they started on as straight a line as possible to the where the lights emerged from the horizon to curve outwards and upwards. Neither Eliard nor Cassandra knew how long it would take to get there, and if it wasn’t for the regular ‘stars’ that climbed up into the sky, they would never have known.

  “Six,” Eliard counted as the last one broke through the meson field, and both the pirate and agent turned their head and covered their eyes as they waited for the monumental glare of smashing light and escaping Hawking radiation.

  They were tired and their limbs ached, both from the trek they had pushed themselves through, as well as the shuddering memory of the agony they had gone through as they had traveled through the warp field itself. What made it worse was that neither of them had time or opportunity to bring any rations with them, and there didn’t even appear to be any water of any kind on this barren rock.

  Not that Eliard was sure that he would trust the water—or any foodstuffs—that he found on this living warp-planet, that was…

  As they had continued to walk, it seemed to both Eliard and Cassandra that the very air was charged with the sort of agitation you might feel before a heavy thunderstorm. It was a preternatural quiet, aside from the crunch, crunch, crunch of their boots on the rock. The captain’s teeth ached and felt thick like when near to a high-voltage power source.

  This whole planet looks to be a high-voltage power source. Eliard’s eyes once again slid over the nearest sigil that his feet passed.

  “El! Snap out of it. We’re there and you’ll want to see this…” Cassandra’s words stirred the captain to shake his head. He didn’t know if it was the weird environment or the fact that the entire planet was pregnant with warp energies, or just that he had been jumping and fighting and running for what seemed like days now, but he felt queasy and lightheaded, almost dreamlike.

  “Huh?” The pirate captain raised his head to look at what the agent was pointing towards, to see that they had indeed found the source of the light transmissions.

  It was a star port. Kind of. Only it wasn’t.

  The two small humanoid figures stood on the edge of a plateau that curved around a cradle of broken, black-rock hills, protecting a shallow bowl that might have once been an impact crater.

  Down there, occupying the majority of it, was another of the ziggurats of the ancient Valyien shrines, only it wasn’t just made of the bare rock formations like every other one that Eliard and Cassandra had seen. This was one of the ziggurats as it was when they were new, when they were fully functional.

  Instead of the dull featurelessness of the rock ziggurats, this one glittered with lights—many hundreds and thousands of tiny, pulsing lights that winked and flickered. Eliard got the impression that they were either lights of avenues, or porthole windows into a well-lit space station… The stepped walls of the ziggurat were crenelated with metal-like railings and walls—streets, perhaps. Eliard could see movement passing along them—rounded, dark humps that hovered and moved at efficient speeds. There was hardly any noise, but what there was, Eliard was sure that he could hear the hum and whirr of distant boosters or engines. Traffic.

  “Transporters,” Eliard said. “Or drones. Ships.”

  This was no Valyien shrine. This was a Valyien city.

  “There! Look, Eliard, look!” Cassandra pointed across the terraced cityscape to where there was an avenue of lights like a ramp that swept from halfway up one side of the ziggurat down to the plain. There appeared to be some sort of cavalcade moving steadily up the ramp. More floating and moving lights forming an escort for much smaller shapes inside.

  “Damn! I wish I had some auto-glasses!” Cassandra said, meaning the ubiquitous sort of magnifying lenses that were available from any ship’s locker in any Imperial Coalition ship in their own time.

  Which was probably a few hundred thousand years away, if not a few million! Eliard thought dismally. The enormity of what he was expecting himself to do, and what he was asking Cassandra Milan beside him to do, broke over him.

  “It looks like something big is going on, something important,” the agent beside him murmured, not noticing the captain’s apparent moment of doubt. “Maybe that is why the gate brought us here, and now? You said you wanted to go back to where the trouble began, right?”

  Eliard had always thought that he was good with trouble. Being a pirate, and learning how to rely on his wits, and yes, being what many others called ‘reckless,’ the dread Pirate Captain Eliard Martin had believed that he would be able to find the solutions to the problems as he always did—in the spur of the moment, doing what Ponos had initially chosen him to do in order to be the unlikely savior of the human race. It was his ability to consistently produce low-possibility, high-risk results and stay alive that had drawn Ponos to him.

  But now, looking at himself and the agent beside him, and looking at what they had to do—destroy an entire alien city—it appeared laughable.

  All I’ve got is the Device on my arm, he thought, looking at the stubborn node of blueish scales that covered his lower right forearm, completely enclosing his fist somewhere inside of it.

  And Cassandra, his heart said.

  “Come on, let’s get a closer look. There has to be a way down from here.” Eliard took a deep breath and nodded to where the plateau seemed to break, and a line of sloping rocks led to the city of the ancient Valyien themselves.

  9

  The Valyien

  Eliard and Cassandra made their way past the strange rocks, their hands grabbing for fingerholds at the maddening edges of alien signs. This wasn’t a path that they were following, it was little more than a tumble of rocks and pulverized dust, but it was easy enough that they didn’t have to climb or jump.

  Even this far away, Eliard was still concerned they would be spotted. As they neared the plains, they saw that the Valyien ziggurat-city was even larger and more developed than they had originally thought. The ‘triangle’ of the central shape lost its exact climb and tapered away, so that each terrace extended further across the plain, dotted with black metal and black-block buildings so that it looked to the captain like a dizzying maze of exact proportions. Every ‘street’ had small spikes that ended in steadily-glowing lights, and every building held the dark shadows of rhomboid, metal doorways.

  There was no outer wall to this city, however, and no guards patrolling its outer circumference. Instead there were singular eight-sided ‘towers’ with darkened portholes, whose crown of spike-lights were a slightly redder color than what the pirate was thinking of as ‘streetlights.’

  Eliard hissed as they saw something moving down the functionalistic, complicated streets, and he drew a breath. The movement belonged to the transport shapes—the rounded shells of the hovering transports, which were the only round shapes he saw—whose underside glowed with a pinkish-crimson glow. Like warp engines, the captain thought.

  These rounded transports were about half the size of Eliard’s Mercury Blade, making them probably capable of carrying anywhere between five and twenty people at a push…if the people were humans.

  But the people of this city weren’t humans at all, were they?

  Eliard and Cassandra froze, crouched between the last two largest ‘natural’ boulders as one of the transports cross
ed a perfectly exact junction, turned, and paused before lowering itself down to the floor.

  A rhomboid of light appeared on one edge of the shell, describing a doorway, before the rhomboid slid out and down to form a ramp.

  And out walked one of the long-dead, ancient Valyien.

  The creatures were quadrupeds, Eliard was surprised to see. He had seen the inscriptions of the Valyien in the modern-era ziggurats of course, but for some reason, he had assumed that those were the fantastical descriptions of their alien spirits and gods, since he couldn’t fathom how such a strange race had ever managed to become so proficient or technologically advanced.

  This singular ancient Valyien—not so ancient, the captain reminded himself—stalked down the platform on four thin legs that were oddly jointed and seemed covered in nodules that could have been bones or glands, for all he knew. Its skin was a tan-grayish color, looking almost as dark as the rocks that they hid behind when it moved between the lights of the transporter doorway.

  It was also big, he saw. Much bigger than a human—about twice as tall and three times as long. The main hump of its body that held the four legs appeared oddly rounded and bulbous, and Eliard realized that it was wearing some sort of cloth harness across its hindquarters, one that glittered with what he would have called LED lights, revealing strange pouches and saddle bags.

  The thing’s torso, however, that swept straight up from the front two ‘legs’ appeared mostly bare and displayed a heavily muscled, milky-gray flesh that was crisscrossed with a simple cross-harness, a little like the Duergar battle-harnesses. It had two long arms that appeared to have one more elbow than a normal human’s, and when Eliard saw its head—

  “Dear heavens!” he hissed and flinched.

  Even a little over fifty meters away, there was an answering spasm from the Valyien, Eliard was sure, and he swore that the thing turned its gruesome head in their direction.

  The Valyien might have almost normal human arms—save the extra elbows, and the long groups of fingers like claws—but its head was far from human-normal. For a start, they had mandibles.