Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  The assassin following Kalder might have a care for the billions dead on Muqin, but he wasn’t allowing it to keep him from his work. Kalder had been aware of the man’s presence for several minutes, though he made no show of it.

  It was not unheard of for a senator to be targeted by a political rival in such a way, especially since the Imperator had vanished and things had truly started falling apart. Now the senators, who ought to have been paragons of how people should conduct themselves in times of great strife, had begun to fold, their tactics devolving to baser methods.

  Was it Hossel? Probably. The man’s perfidy and arrogance make him clumsy, and the Fall of Man has made everyone desperate.

  Oblivion awaits.

  Even if it wasn’t Hossel that sent the assassin, if it was some other senator who had remained silent during the meeting, Hossel’s outburst and perceived prominence among the Arms would have emboldened the assassin’s employer. But the quickness with which this assassin had been dispatched showed clearly that someone, at the very least, had been setting this up for a while—Kalder’s meeting had accelerated what plans had been forming in the shadows.

  Kalder did not panic. And he did not immediately beseech anyone around him for help. Rather, he began a slow change of course through the labyrinth of rock tunnels, passing through a smoking den, a two-table-only restaurant, and a brothel where the prostitutes sat outside playing porhl.

  The assassin wended his way through the crowds, getting closer when the traffic was thick, and backing off when there was little to hide behind. Kalder made sure he was never completely alone, and as he approached a juncture that would return him to Hall Beta, he sped up fractionally, turning the corner tightly and rushing to the sorry-looking object sulking against the wall.

  “You said you would serve me,” he told the machine.

  As if awakened from a cruel nightmare, the Trix bot’s head snapped around to look at him. Its single working eye burned lava-orange. “I did,” said the Trix.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  It took a fraction of a second for the bot’s facial recognition software to access LOG and figure it out. “Holace Adamik Fuller Kalder,” it said. “Colloquially known as ‘the Dreaded.’ Senator of the Republic. A Man of Honor.” Meaning he had completed the Course of Honors and had not had his status as a Man of Honor revoked for any crimes, scandals, or questionable behavior.

  “Correct. You understand it is beneficial to work for a Man of Honor, yes?”

  “It is not only beneficial, I am required, if asked, to serve.”

  “Excellent. So your prerogatives have not decayed along with your body, I see.” Kalder glanced over his shoulder, aware that his assassin was seconds away from rounding the corner. “A man is coming to kill me. Will you defend this Man of Honor?”

  “With my whole being,” the bot said.

  The assassin came around the corner. Twenty steps away, his eyes met with Kalder’s. He was short, stocky, and cloaked casually—a single-folded robe, easy to cast off in a crowd if he needed to change appearance. He came directly at the old man, a grim smile on his face, and found his mistake just two steps before he reached Kalder.

  The assassin saw the Trix, and his eyes went wide.

  It happened quickly. The slither-blade was brandished. It flashed in the dim overhead light. The assassin came at Kalder. Then the bot shot away from the wall, its hand clamping down on the assassin’s wrist with enough force that he both yelped and dropped his weapon. The bot twisted the wrist until Kalder heard crackling, and the assassin dropped to his knees, gasping, looking at his ruined hand. The assassin tried something less subtle than a blade—a whisperer, its short, bull-pup muzzle coming to bear on the bot. He wasn’t concerned about Kalder anymore, but his own life.

  Now the bot grabbed that hand and folded the arm in half. In the wrong direction. Bone popped free of flesh with a hideous crunch as the bot lifted the assassin off the ground, screaming and kicking.

  Kalder rounded the assassin, patting him down casually, in no hurry. A few passersby stopped and gawked. Kalder behaved as if he and the assassin were all alone in the tunnel. He found two more blades and one more whisperer hidden within the man’s robe, as well as two holotabs—probably both of them were untraceable.

  After gathering all these items, Kalder instructed the bot, “Follow me.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Down six corridors and two lift shafts, passing the wide-eyed stares of beggars and bazaar owners alike, the bot dragged the man along. The assassin occasionally hollered for help, kicking at the walls, trying to grab people with his feet. Vigiles responded to all this noise, their spears out to make an arrest, but when they saw it was Kalder the Dreaded, they stood down.

  They made it all the way back to Kalder’s office with only a few cursory questions from sentry bots—“Do you need any assistance securing your prisoner, Senator?” they asked, assuming Kalder the Dreaded knew what he was doing. He refused them all, and pushed past them.

  At his office door, he once again encountered the tattooed man with the bald pate, who stepped forward and said, “Senator, I really must speak to you—”

  “Not now,” Kalder said, stepping around him.

  “My master d’Arhagen bids me to seek your—” When the bald man saw the Trix bot carrying the broken assassin, he adopted a wary look, and stood to one side.

  They swept into Kalder’s office and he had the Trix drop the assassin on the floor in a heap. Kalder knelt in front of the man, whose face was an alloy of agony and fear.

  “Now,” Kalder said, “was it Hossel?”

  FOR THE TENTH time that night, Moira was going over the path she had charted for Kalder’s journey. He called it the Crusade. A series of jumps from one star system to the next, in search of Stranger sites. The calculations had to be exact, there could not be a single item off. She had to confer with Diogenes, a common AI system that stellarpaths and military navigators had been using for centuries, to check old navigational data and predict for drift.

  Nav data was invaluable in interstellar travel. In order to chart a safe course, one had to account for stellar drift, the gravitic effects of rogue bodies, asteroids, dwarf planets, the intersection of black holes with other cosmic bodies, so on and so forth. The universe appeared to be sitting still, but in fact the “address” of a star system was always changing, as was the route to get there.

  Galactic cartography had risen commensurate with the development of the first A-drive, its developers using quantum computers to suss out the data needed to get from Here to There, across many light-years. They started by breaking up the Milky Way Galaxy into three main pieces: Sectors, Sector Quadrants, and Sector Blocks. There were four Sectors, each of those having exactly eight hundred Sector Quadrants, and each of those having four hundred Sector Blocks. And finally, each one of those was broken down into tinier and tinier Decants, Pentants, and Haplants.

  All of this gave a stellarpath the “general locality address” of a star system, or GLA. The GLA for the star system that Kalder wanted her to plot them to, for instance, was S3.SQ775.SB179.D7.P6.H124, with a local address (or LA) of Pl3.L2.Hm3.A9, but every bit of that was subject to change if, in the course of her research into old nav data, she uncovered some long forgotten space station, or swarm of deep-space probes that some ancient space agency had neglected to keep in the records, or traces of the Ecophage.

  The number crunching did not bother her. She loved numbers, almost as much as she loved the studies of xenoarchaeology and history. It was a synthesis of those two studies that made for good stellarpaths. So, if it wasn’t the numbers and the plotting that bothered her so much, what was it?

  As she worked, Moira listened to the recording she had made of the Tantis 815 site on Zhirinovsky 373d.

  “Dredda’dress’dresda’dredda’dreth’dreya’dredd’den’danna…”

  It was singsong at times, and guttural at others.

  “Definitely syllabic,”
she muttered to herself. “But also highly tonal.”

  Water dripped onto her head. Moira looked up at the rocky ceiling, barely reinforced with compristeel struts. Monarch was a filthy place, either damp and cold or damp and humid, depending on what part of it you were standing in. A miserable place. Even Pritchard, trained to endure harsh conditions, whined from his cage. Puddles of brackish water had gathered around him, reaching an inch or more into his cage.

  It’s a wonder the whole asteroid isn’t flooded, she thought.

  Pritchard pawed lightly against his door.

  “You can come on out, boy,” she said.

  Pritchard barked happily, and nosed the latch of his cage to step out, first tentatively, then excitedly as he bound onto the bed with her. She pushed aside the holotabs, transitioning her work screens to her lenses. While she scratched Pritchard’s muzzle, Moira flipped through the old nav charts, waving her hands in the air and prioritizing one screen over another.

  “All right,” she sighed, filing her last report and sending it off to Kalder. “I think that’ll do it. I hope he’s happy with it. But for the life of me I can’t figure why he wants to head to the Eaton System. There’s really not much there.”

  Moira pulled up more files on LOG concerning Eaton. LOG, or the Library of Gathered data, was the last vestige of a human-operated network of information in the galaxy. So much had broken down in human society, and LOG was an effort put into place about two hundred years ago to assemble every article, every book, every scrap of film or music ever put together by Man. A salvage attempt, Moira thought.

  LOG did not have very much on Eaton. It recorded the date that it had been discovered, but not the names of those doing the discovering. Those had been lost. She knew it was a system orbiting a single main-sequence star, though, and that it was lifeless.

  LOG had a few corrupted pics of the sixth planet, called Dwimer. There were a number of shaky vids of a dusty, red-surfaced world with ochre clouds moving fast across a pale blue sky, but that was about it. There were also mentions of a fossil record, stone structures found standing on those plains, as well as atavistic steel structures preserved deep beneath the polar ice caps. Some dead civilization that barely got off the ground, perhaps, but apparently never made it to the heavens before it collapsed.

  Moira did find one vid, however, that intrigued her. Again, the vid’s quality had been diluted by neglect, and by too many poor transfers from one decrepit computer to the next, but somewhere along the way some historian or other had uncovered it and dumped it onto LOG.

  The recordings were of an expedition made to Dwimer by xenoarchaeologists some two hundred years ago. Since the vid itself was so poor, Moira just listened to the audio on repeat: “…stepping inside now, through the main edifice at site location ‘Grazen two-two-seven-five.’ There’s…a lot of interference. Our radios aren’t broadcasting as well. Our last contact with the shuttle was eight days ago. They’re supposed to return tomorrow no matter what, so we’ll see…[static]…have to see this for yourselves. The people here…[static]…something went wrong. Might have worshipped…[static]…as gods, but not sure.”

  There was a long, loud tone that indicated a break in the recording times. Then, it started again.

  “Mannick says he’s hearing a voice down in Tunnel Three, like a recording on repeat. Three’s got a collapsed portion, so we might have to do some digging…[static]…”

  There were seventeen of these recordings, all filed by an unknown explorer. Moira skipped to the last one, which was the one most chilling to her. It was short, and though it was the same person speaking as before, his voice sounded very different, almost shaken. “…dead…[static]…all dead. They knew something…[static]…demons. All demons…”

  Moira stopped it and played it back.

  “…demons. All demons…”

  Moira thought back to what she had found in Zhirinovsky—the lights, the sounds, the slithering serpent amid all that light, the singsong voices—and she wondered if this was somehow related to whatever the explorers on Eaton had found. Was it connected? More to the point, did Kalder believe it was connected? Was that why he had her plotting a course for Second Fleet? Why was he so obsessed? What did he know that no one else did? What had he—

  Another sliver of brackish water spilled onto her head, through a crack in the ceiling.

  Moira growled in frustration.

  “That’s it!” she said, committing herself in that moment to getting out. “I’m sorry, Pritch, but you have to go back in your cage. I’ve been cooped up in tight confines for months, and been working inside caves for far too long. I need to get out for a bit.”

  Pritchard barked in dismay.

  “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll put your cage up on the bed so you don’t get wet.”

  Moira always packed two sets of civilian clothes, one for casual outings and one for special occasions, like dancing or trying to seduce a gentleman. That last one rarely saw use. She garbed herself in a white stola and palla hood, and covered her shoulders in a shawl of green that her mother would have been proud of. Green is the only thing that looks good on your pale ass, her mother had been known to say. She wore knee-high rope sandals—she’d heard those were coming back, but truly she knew little about fashion.

  Fashion meant precious little at the Fall of Man.

  When she stepped out into the rocky warrens of Monarch, Moira was once again struck by the hordes of staggering bots. She passed at least two that had broken down and sat slumped against the wall of one corridor, looking forlornly at the ruin of their bodies. Moira understood that, in places like these, people often scavenged whatever they could, smashing bots to the ground and taking what they could for recycling.

  One such bot looked up at her as she passed, even reached out to her, like a homeless beggar seeking a handout.

  Down two more corridors, and finally into a common area, she came to a place called simply the New Forum, where lots of business was done and armored Vigiles roamed the lanes. There was an aisle called Lawyer’s Lane, where scribes waited to accept payment for writing wills or help with bringing some minor squabble to the attention of a judge or magistrate.

  The next aisle contained the Avenue of Bargains, basically just a bunch of carts set up with what scant imports had made it through on the last shipment. There was the Street of Improvement, where holographic salespeople attempted to lure passersby into shops where imtech and software upgrades were offered.

  It was loud in here. And sweltering. Hosts of humans from a hundred worlds were all huddled and pushing. Sweat ran down Moira’s armpits in rivulets. The aromas of half-cooked questionable meats and unwashed masses rankled her nose. The fetor of highly-populated asteroids was widely known, but Moira had rarely encountered a wall of filth such as this. Puddles of stagnant water were traipsed by filthy feet. All clothes clung to sweaty bodies, and were stained to a uniform no-color. Dust and water fell softly and constantly from the ceiling, not in any great streams, but just enough to create a haze through which failing halogens cast their murky light.

  Moira’s motives for leaving her hotel room had not just been to get a little fresh air. Places like this were cauldrons of gossip. She paused at a priest’s stall on the Avenue of Blessings, offered a couple of doms to have a prayer placed on her. Beside her was a woman, who asked for a blessing to be placed on their beloved Senate.

  Moira saw her opportunity, and followed the woman as she walked away from the priest’s stall.

  “Do you pray for Kalder, too, when you pray for the Senate?” she asked the woman.

  “Kalder?” the woman said. She was old, permanently bent, with an oculator in place of her left eye. It looked in need of replacing.

  “Yes. The senator?” said Moira, jogging the woman’s memory.

  “The Dreaded. Oy, aye. And what of him?”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m a journalist,
” Moira said with a congenial smile. “I’m just getting to know the people and the events of Monarch.”

  The woman snorted. “I expect him to be upon the Senate floor, that one. Probably talking fine and long even now, you bet. Longwinded, that one. And don’t try to interrupt him or sway his opinion: Kalder does not bend,” she added sagely. “Push me why he’s always talking, but talking he always is. No use in it anyhow, right? Oblivion awaits.”

  The lingo and accents varied greatly from asteroid to asteroid and world to world, and though hearing the uneducated talk at length was sometimes acid to her ears, Moira also recognized a gossip when she saw one. The woman appeared to have opinions on Kalder the Dreaded, and so Moira invited her to opine.

  For the next half hour, the woman alternated between pontificating about why Kalder’s stance on things was all wrong, and why her husband admired him so much. Her man apparently liked Kalder’s direct methods, his unflinching nature, and how he had never, ever broken a promise or gone against his beliefs, even when he stood alone in the Senate.

  “Kalder will have his Crusade,” the woman said. “Push me why he wants it so bad, but he will have it, that one.”

  Moira thanked her, and moved along after refusing her offer to come to a prayer meeting.

  “Lord Christ saves,” the old woman promised, as she vanished into the crowd.

  Moira popped into a few of the shops on the Street of Improvement to check out what, if any, worthwhile upgrades they had on display. As it turned out, none at all, but when asked, two of the shopkeeps had a lot of praise to fling at Kalder. Kalder the Dreaded was a tough old man, they said, filled with a reverence for the Old Ways and emboldened by a prophesy set down in the Scrolls by the Strangers. One of the shopkeeps thought Kalder was crazy, but still respected him. The other shopkeep acted like he would marry Kalder if he got the chance.

  There were holopane projectors all throughout the Forum, and almost all of them were showing the destruction of Muqin. The face of the poet Arpool showed up again and again, tearfully saying his immortal words, “This is our end. All life ends here. Chased like ants, unable to make sense of the giants that continually kick over our anthills.”