Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  She walked around the dais, making vids and getting high-resolution close-ups of what she felt would be the more salient bits to her employer. She recorded vids from all angles so as to form a perfect three-dimensional model later.

  Time and neglect had been harsh to the area. The ground crunched underfoot—the floor was covered with broken obsidian. Apparently, a vein of lava had ruptured here long ago, dumping a lake of lava into this place. There was a gigantic hole in one wall that seemed to have been the trouble. Now, the area was cooled and black, shimmering a little in her lamplight.

  With a gesture in the air, Moira activated the audio recorder. “This is Moira Holdengard,” she said. “Recording a finding on Zhirinovsky 373b, at site designated Tantis 815. A previously unexplored tunnel system, labeled 9891C by human explorers, and believed to have been left by the Strangers, uh, with changes made by unknown number of xenos that came after.”

  She stepped up onto the dais and spun around slowly, giving the camera a 360-degree view.

  “The chamber is round, with no right angles, conducive with previous known Stranger sites. The chamber appears to be unmolested for a couple of centuries, if I had to guess. A lot of it is how the last human explorers described it when they came with the Isoshi priests. The walls and floor are pure obsidian. The dais I’m standing on is at the dead center of the room and appears to have been an item of some importance. Relevance to site unknown. No biologics detected, either within the chamber or within the corridor that led me here.”

  Moira paused for a moment and reached inside one of the pockets of the satchel at her side. She withdrew the ceramic-metal container of Moon Scroll IV, and, just as she had been instructed, she laid the thing at the foot of the dais.

  Nothing happened.

  Was it supposed to? she thought.

  “I have done as I have been asked,” she said, pointing her helmet at the ground so that it could record the action. “I’ve placed the Moon Scroll at the foot of the dais, and so far there has been no…”

  She stopped.

  Moira checked her hands. She was trembling, almost imperceptibly.

  No…not me.

  The floor. It was shaking. Trembling ever so slightly.

  “Hang on,” she said. “Activity. There’s some activity from the…” She trailed off, turning around and around, suddenly worried that she might have come to this chamber at a critical moment, just when the same vein that burst before was ready to burst again. “Oh, shit.”

  Moira leapt off the dais and started to run towards the exit, but when she did, she noticed the floor wasn’t shaking anymore. She turned. It was the dais. It was shaking. Suddenly, right before her eyes, it cracked. Fragile as an eggshell, the obsidian rock split down the center, then spider-webbed in all directions. Showers of potentially deadly obsidian shards rained down on her, and Moira ducked and covered her head.

  When it was over, something long, golden, and pole-like shot out of the floor, tearing through the dais and breaking it to pieces.

  Before Moira could get a good look at the thing, there was a brilliant flash of yellow light that assailed her. Moira had to shield her eyes against it. She started to turn and run, but then stopped…stared…and had to marvel at the shimmering display in front of her.

  At first, her mind had as hard a time adjusting as her eyes did, but then colors began to attract to one another, coming together like dust particles in a vacuum. They swirled and coalesced into shapes, forming patterns that were dotted and dashed…Sort of like Morse code, she thought, her mind racing to grasp.

  Then there was a sound. It was singsong at first, with broken beats, but then it resolved into a pattern. Like the colors pulling themselves into discernible shapes, so too did the sounds begin to develop recurring themes. A rhythm. Mutterings began issuing from the stone walls all around her, whickering voices, soft as the wind.

  Now there came different symbols. Large, looping ones…

  Almost forgetting where she was and what she was doing, Moira’s fingers stumbled over her holotab before forming coherent commands. She adjusted the settings to her recorders and began narrating all she was seeing.

  “Uh…uh…it’s…I’m seeing large holographic shapes. All of them curved, circular, oval, or arched—like script, but completely unlike anything I’ve ever seen before…checking LOG now to see if any of the symbols match any known xenos runes or script…no. Nothing. Script is of unknown origin…”

  The voices grew louder, and now she could make out a clear, bass quality emerging from it. And syllables.

  “Dredda’dress’dresda’dredda’dreth’dreya’dreddi…” it went.

  “I’m hearing a voice. Several voices. All of them speaking in unison. Or perhaps one voice reverberating? Hard to tell. And there’s…there’s…yes, I’m hearing a repetition of the same basic syllables over and over…but with slight shifts in tone. It could be a tonal language, like Chinese, where meaning is more nuanced with each dip or rise in tone.” Moira paused, listening, allowing the recorder to get some of the language without her talking over it.

  “I’m hearing a word like ‘dredda’ being repeated over and over. Voices are…everywhere. It’s just…” She trailed off.

  Moira stepped back from the array of dancing symbols, and tried to imagine what it all could mean. But any conclusions she made at this point would be pure conjecture. “Um…voices seem to be getting louder. More shapes…more designs…none of them have made any familiar image. I don’t see any images that could be construed as a building or structure or people…these aren’t home movies.”

  Moira almost laughed, too trapped in awe to do much else but gape. This was fantastic! Utterly fantastic! She was witnessing something that, to her knowledge, no one had ever seen before.

  Then, just as the light show seemed to reach its climax, the holographic display’s brilliance reached a whole new level. It was like looking into a sun from only a few million miles away, just dazzling, unending light. At last, it dimmed, and as she blinked, Moira saw something dancing in the afterimage that looked like it was burned on the back of her eyelids. Every time she blinked, she saw it. It was a long, snaking image, first white, then purple, then red. Then, finally, it dissolved and vanished. She had seen it, though, hadn’t she? Just before the lights shut themselves off, leaving her in perpetual dark? A long, undulating serpent, coiling and uncoiling…

  It looks like a wyrm, she thought, her mind going to the large flying serpents commanded in certain Republic fleets.

  Moira became aware that the voices had retreated but hadn’t entirely vanished. Breathing heavily, she approached the dais, now motionless and dormant. No more lights, no more images, just a tall, golden rod that had projected the light show.

  There were whispers, though. Whispers that came from every dark corner of the room. Whispers that frightened her, made her feel small, like a little girl again, asleep in her bedroom, wanting to go to the restroom but frightened of the hands she knew—she knew—would reach out from underneath the bed and grab her ankles…

  “H-hello?” she said, shivering as if she was standing barefoot on ice.

  There was no answer.

  Moira walked around the dais. The golden rod was now silent, dead. In fact, if she wasn’t mistaken, it was losing its luster by the second. Whatever power source had powered it was now depleted. She reached out, touched it, and found that it was cold. She felt it even through her gloves. Moira backed away, performed a few more searches of the surrounding area, and then made her final recording of the experience while it was still fresh in her mind.

  At some point Moira figured that she had all she had come for—and had found more than she’d bargained for—and started heading back to her ship. She grabbed up the Moon Scroll, and stopped one last time to admire the quiescence of the cavern. For so long it had sat undisturbed. It had seen this brief burst of activity and now it would slumber again.

  Perhaps not for long, she thought. Not once I get thi
s recording out there.

  That idea excited her like no other prospect in her professional career ever had.

  The climb back out was just as quiet and ominous as the climb in had been. However, here and there, she paused to listen to what she thought were distant voices.

  Probably just the wind keening through the tunnel entrance.

  Part of her was afraid to return to the ship, but all of her was afraid to stay. There was something about this place, now that she looked at it with eyes fresh from the tunnels, that haunted her. Looking out over the dark landscape of the planet, with its bleak, foreboding clouds and shifting, rumbling earth, Moira came to think of it as a bad place, one with unsettled spirits. A place of dark and ancient secrets, all of which were perhaps better left buried.

  She shook off her paranoia and concentrated on getting back to the shuttle. She couldn’t wait to strip off her e-suit and take a nice, long shower.

  In the cockpit, Moira found Pritchard whining. She gave him a good petting, then sat in the pilot’s seat and started the liftoff cycle. She mixed the pycno fuel pellets in with the helium-3 tanks, all the while thinking about what she’d seen, and the serpentine image still somewhat burned on the back of her eyelids.

  Moira decided to leave the liftoff to the ship’s AI, so that she could go take a shower, but just then a chime sounded, this one coming in on an emergency channel. Curious, Moira studied it, and found that it was an automated response from some other ship. She checked the transponder code. It was old. Very old. So old that it wasn’t listed in any current registry.

  “Huh,” she said, biting her lower lip. She assigned the AI to give it a more thorough analysis, and then checked with LOG. Turned out, it was a code belonging to a series of shuttles more than eight hundred years old! And it was coming from this very planet, about two thousand miles away.

  But this was no real mystery. It only took a bit more digging and a bit of common sense to know what this was. A lost ship. One of the lost human colonists trying to find their way home, or perhaps they’d come out this way looking for a new place to call home. They’d crash-landed centuries ago, or ran out of fuel and dropped a stake, then started running low on supplies. They hit the emergency SOS, heard nothing, died out, and the ship kept on broadcasting, and probably would for another eight centuries.

  Poor bastards, she thought. These incidents weren’t all that rare for a far-flung explorer such as herself. Moira had even found a couple of small, inbred civilizations living in the hills of a planet in the Holowitz System years ago. None of them had ever seen a starship before—the materials of the ship their ancestors had crashed in had been broken down and used to build rudimentary houses and water-gathering wheelhouses. Moira had offered them a way off planet. Then she’d seen the human skins they had stretched out over fire pits, and some of the skins adorning the walls of one of their hovels. Cannibals. She had tried surreptitiously to escape, and they had nearly raped and killed her before she got to her shuttle.

  The SOS light was still blinking on the screen. Part of Moira wanted to see if there was anyone left to save, but another part—a stronger part—said it wasn’t worth it. It never was. She was only too glad to go into places alone, where no one could help or harm her. But go check on a small civilization of inbred crewmen, one that might have learned to sucker unsuspecting Gods From The Sky with their God Summoning SOS Device? No, thank you. She’d heard of that trick, too.

  Moira cued up the vertical thrusters, ready to drop this place like a bad habit.

  As the shuttle dusted off, breaking atmosphere, a figure stood on the surface about five miles away, watching the blue ionic exhaust that was left in its wake.

  : Asteroid Monarch

  “I must say, I’m surprised you would make such an offer to me. Especially after our…history.” Senator Walther Jayn den Pennick was a barrel-chested man who wore his robes tight to his body, as if his soldierly past had imprinted onto him a need to be constantly ready. One could not fight if one’s robes were too loose, after all. The rest of him was not soldierly at all, though. His belly was swollen and looked tumorous, and the buckle that went across it appeared to be clenching for dear life.

  “Which history would that be, Senator?” inquired Kalder.

  “I’m speaking specifically of our history of screeching at each other like women in the Senate Hall,” Pennick chuckled. “Back when we were reworking the entitlement programs?”

  Kalder nodded. Though, the way he remembered it, he had kept his calm throughout the Thirty-Second Entitlement Reform Bill debates. Pennick had been going through his third divorce back then, and one of his former legions had just been decimated by the Brood. The XXIV Legion had gone into the Punari System on an order pushed through the Senate by Pennick and his Arm, so it had been both an emotional and professional blow to him.

  “You know me, Senator,” Kalder went on, waving his adversary down another tall corridor. They were walking through Monarch’s only park, passing the steaming rooms of the hot baths. “I’m a man who puts all victories and defeats behind me.”

  “All victories and defeats?” Pennick asked skeptically. Overhead, the string lights were switching on and off indecisively, so Pennick’s face alternated between bright curiousity and glowering malevolence. The corridor lights were just one more thing on Monarch that needed serious attention.

  “The past is the repository of our mistakes,” Kalder said philosophically. “As well as our greatest moments of triumph. That’s where they belong, far behind us. No matter how much we wish to recycle the glorious, or polish off the inglorious, they must remain there, forever in the past. We can do nothing about them.”

  “But as a member of the Restoration Arm, you cannot be above looking to the past for inspiration,” Pennick pointed out. “That is, after all, what you stand for.”

  “My party stands for that, I merely sit on the same aisle sometimes.”

  “But you of all people should know that in politics, where we stand often corresponds to where we sit.”

  Kalder nodded in allowance. “Often, but not always, and I meant only that I don’t dwell on the past or try to paint it better than it actually was, or to make it sound worse than it was.”

  “And you should know,” said Pennick, nodding amiably to a pair of silver-armored Vigiles who walked by. “For I hear you were there for a lot of the past mistakes. I hear rumors that you were there before the founding of the Republic.” He chuckled, then his tone turned a bit serious. “I’ve never dared ask before, but just how old are you, Kalder? Do you have some private stash of regens you’ve kept secret?”

  Kalder ignored both questions. “I don’t dwell on the past. I do, however, learn from it, and I use it to reflect and analyze critical moments of decision to see where, had we exercised greater adherence to the Old Ways, we might’ve prevented calamity.”

  “I see,” Pennick chortled, his laughter rumbling so deeply in his chest it sounded like an engine on idle. “The Old Ways. A sad dream of returning to the days of part industrial expansion using drones, and part exploration with flesh-and-blood humans at the fore. And so, when you perform such, ah, reflections, do you often see me there?”

  “I do.”

  “And you see mistakes that I made with the legions. You see my judgment as muddled and muddy. You think, had I not pushed for greater expansion decades ago, we could’ve been more centralized, organized, and more prepared for the Brood.”

  “I do,” Kalder admitted. He led his contemporary down another corridor, towards the cold pools. These corridors were freshly bored, the floors therefore jagged. Kalder’s bare feet scraped across them, but so callused were they that he scarcely felt it. He scarcely felt anything anymore, come to think of it. Gone were the emotions that motivated him to victory as a young man. In their place, a cold resolution, left over from some old programming that said he had a duty to the Republic. Perhaps if he could finish it, his programming would be satisfied and he could retire. Per
haps. But for now, there was Pennick and his Arm and the Moon Scrolls, and of course the Strangers. Riddles upon riddles to suss out. The riddles intrigued him, drew him in, and meant more to him than his monthly stipend.

  “Then why are we even having this discussion,” Pennick said, “if I am just another reminder of mistakes that cannot be polished or erased?”

  Pennick paused as they passed through one of the outer wings of the sublevel hydroponics lab. There were plants growing out from the walls, most of them looking pale and weak beneath such meager sunlamps. “These don’t look healthy at all,” he commented.

  “There’s been a problem with the hydroponics,” Kalder said. “Some contaminant or other has gotten into the water supply, altered the pH. No one seems to know how to correct it.”

  He looked at Pennick as they walked.

  “But to answer your question, it’s because I’m old, Pennick. Far older than anyone else in the Senate. And perhaps it’s time I looked at my own record honestly. In my youth I made great strides in the Senate. In recent years, however, it has been the case that I am never able to successfully push through any legislation of my own.”

  Pennick looked at him, intrigued.

  “Oh, sure, I am able to assist with others’ legislation, and you and I both know that my support goes far. My support goes far,” Kalder clarified, “but not my ideas.”

  “They’re too radical,” Pennick said flatly. “And the Faith 6A index reflects that. It shows the majority of people across the galaxy agree.”

  “My ideas are actually quite simple, Senator,” Kalder said, raising a hand as if pointing out a salient point to a pupil. “Very simple. Simply pull our resources back to Sol and pace ourselves. People will die from overpopulation of a single star system and lack of resources, almost certaintly, but how is that less acceptable or less humane than sending them off to die in ceaseless wars?”

  Pennick said nothing.

  “At least in my version of events the necessary people will die off, equilibrium will be reestablished, and if at that point we still wish to explore the cosmos, we can.”