Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Moira perused Lawyer’s Lane, and after being flashed a futa’s cock and turning her down, she got some information from her. Here, Moira got a much more colored description of Kalder as viewed by a prostitute.

  “He’s old and sodded, that one,” the futa said. The surgeries and gen-engineering had allowed her to keep her original female form, but the woman’s male member, which swung pendulously between her legs, was a distraction. “But damned if he isn’t solid. ‘Like the rock of Monarch,’ that’s what my father always said of him. ‘He isn’t going anywhere.’ I also think my father thinks Kalder is as old as this asteroid is.”

  “How old is he?” asked Moira. “Does anyone know?”

  “Push me,” the futa shrugged. “I don’t ask my customers their age.”

  Moira’s eyes widened. “You’ve…you mean…you and he…?”

  The futa burst out laughing. “No, luv. He and I have tea. Right over there.” She pointed across the street. “Kalder will sit and drink there a couple times a week, and anybody can sit and chat with him. But don’t ask him anything if you don’t want to hear his honest opinion, you. He can be brutal, him.”

  Moira nodded and thanked the futa, then moved on.

  Surprisingly, she found a stall occupied by a xeno. She had never seen its kind before, and gasped when she saw it. A tall, black-skinned thing without eyes, but vaguely humanoid. It always astonished Moira just how human-like a lot of aliens appeared to be.

  Being a stellarpath, she knew well the Theory of Common Ground, which said that human-like appearance was so commonplace among sentient beings because of common needs of life. Life could not form on planets with too low of gravity, nor too high. If the gravity was too low, chemical bonds did not form. If the gravity was too high, chemicals pressed together too tightly, didn’t move, didn’t cause friction or reactions. And as life grew on these just-right worlds, Nature favored those that could stand up, reach for things, their forelegs turning into manipulators, which could find use for tools.

  She wondered what in the hell this particular xeno was, what world it had come from, and how it wound up here. So, while perusing its wares, she decided to ask it directly. The alien waved its hand in the air, and a holopane emerged in front of it, translating its strange, cricket-like language.

  “You want wares?” the translator screen said.

  She tried a different tact. “Are you familiar with Monarch politics? Do you know anything about Senator Holace Kalder?”

  “Kalder is friend to the Strangers,” the translator screen read. “Kalder is not to be trusted.”

  Moira thought that was odd. She tried pressing the creature for more, but it waved her off, saying that if she wasn’t interested in buying, it had no time for her. Moira walked away, quietly reflective of the fact that, once upon a time, any human being would have been in awe of a newly-discovered alien race, but here was one sitting at a stall, in plain view, alone and desultory, trying to hawk a smattering of wares to a sea of humans that walked by with nary a glance.

  This was what social entropy looked like, she figured. This was what degradation looked like. People being left in such desperate ways, so jaded by who they had been, and the Doom that was upon them all, that they could not be bothered by a revelation such as this.

  As she walked, Moira used her natural-user interface to connect with Monarch’s fragile network, and found both old and recent news bits concerning Kalder, the man some called the “Last True Restorationist.” The small bits about the Moon Scrolls fascinated her the most. Kalder was a kind of historian, which befit a man of the Restoration Arm and craved a return to the Old Ways. But this also made him a kind of contradiction, for what kind of Restorationist held the Old Ways in such esteem, yet was attempting to spend badly needed resources on a giant Crusade across the stars?

  No one who supported him seemed to have a problem with this duplicitous stance of their champion.

  Moira read everything she could find about her employer, eye-flicking repeatedly to page over. Interestingly enough, though, she could not find a birthdate for the man. She had no idea how old he was, or how long he had worked in the Senate, or even what he was the senator of. He seemed to be there as a remnant of some other time, a man who was allowed to have a voice in the Senate only through sheer will of the people that supported him.

  LOG had nothing else on him.

  “Weird,” she muttered.

  She came upon a Harbinger, covered in a black robe and hood, head shaved, the sign of the infinitum etched crudely into the flesh of his forehead. He held out his arms, two stumps where his hands had once been.

  “Know where I can find a good place to eat?” asked Moira.

  “I lost my hands,” the man said through rotted yellow teeth.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that. Do you know where I can find—”

  “And my health depletes! But I don’t care to replace my hands, or my liver, or my teeth. None of it matters. Perhaps I will have them all replaced, though, when I finally surrender myself to the Brood.”

  Moira sighed and shook her head. “Why do you people give up so easily? As long as there are more worlds for us to inhabit, there is hope.”

  “As long as there is hope, there is the Brood,” the Harbinger countered, and turned to beseech another passerby to follow him onto a Brood hive world.

  Moira continued on her search. She should have known better than to ask a Harbinger anything. What was the joke? Ask a young Harbinger what he’ll be once he grows up, and he’ll say “A corpse.”

  The heat became too much. She pulled off her palla, hoping to get a little air running through her hair, but all she got were droplets of warm water plopping down on her. When she finally found a place that looked like it had something resembling digestible food, it was on a balcony carved into the wall. She sat and ate, wincing at the processed flavor of her gruel, looking out over the shuffling masses.

  A fight broke out between two men, then a third joined in, bludgeoning one of them on the head, and fighting to take the unconscious man’s sandals. A pair of security bots showed up and pried them apart, and a Vigile arrested them. The crowd barely slowed down to watch any of this, a few took vids of the altercation on their imtech, but soon carried on.

  What matter the controversial, during the Fall of Man? she thought. Another axiom of the Harbingers, if she wasn’t mistaken.

  A chime sounded in her ears. She waved her hand, and a screen appeared on her retina. A request from Kalder. He was happy with the course she had charted for them, and wanted to speak further on it.

  Moira finished up her meal, paid the one-armed proprietor with a handful of doms, then walked through a sweltering corridor for almost a mile before she reached a place of transport. A lift service took her up four levels, into a much cooler, but no less malodorous, corridor. She passed by pages balancing stacks of slinkplast, the cheap replacement to paper on asteroids everywhere.

  She walked past a few sentry bots, who briefly did a facial scan before permitting her into the senator’s office. At the door, Moira saw a single man in robes of green and red, resplendent in clattering jewelry, and with a bald, tattooed head. He was slumped against one wall, sleeping. She had seen the man outside of Kalder’s office the last time she came. She assumed he was some sort of lobbyist.

  When Moira stepped inside Kalder’s office, she hesitated on the threshold, her eyes going wide. A TRX security bot stood towering in front of her, barring her path. She looked up at its one orange-glowing eye, burning down at her with imagined menace.

  “It’s all right, Trix,” a voice said. “She can come in.”

  The bot stood to one side.

  And Moira barely suppressed a gasp at the scene in front of her.

  A dead man lay on the ground in a pool of blood, and Senator Kalder stood over him, wiping a bloodied blade clean on a towel. His aide, Julian, stood behind the desk, making a call on his imtech. When Julian saw her, he smiled briefly, and held up one fi
nger that signaled he would be with her in just one moment, then pointed to one of the chairs.

  “Ah, Miss Holdengard,” Kalder said, looking at her as nonchalantly as he might an unexpected delivery. “Won’t you come in? I’m afraid I’ll be a minute cleaning up.”

  KALDER IMAGINED THAT the sight must come as something of a shock to the woman. He had to remind himself of this fact, for decades of Zeroistic indoctrination had slowly peeled away the normal human layers of his psyche, layers that would have found the sight of a dead body horrifying. Likely, Moira Holdengard could scarcely envisage the cruel calculations and very necessary steps that had led to his commiting murder.

  “Apologies,” he said, waving a hand and inviting her to sit.

  Moira stood there, staring. “You, um…sent for me?”

  “I did. Please, come in.”

  She remained where she was.

  Kalder thought a smile might be in order, just to calm her down, but Zeroism urged him away from such frivolousness. Leave it to others to indulge in such wasteful gestures, Solagart had written in his Insights on a Mind.

  The woman finally found her feet again, but instead of accepting his invitation to sit, she walked over to the bloody mess on the floor, and stared down at the assassin’s corpse.

  “What…what did he…?”

  “He attempted to kill me,” Kalder said matter-of-factly.

  She blinked. “Right here? In your office?”

  “No. In this office is where I killed him. He approached me in the halls, tracked me through one avenue after the other. If it weren’t for Trix here, I might very well be dead. Trix subdued him, and we finished our interrogation here, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Moira looked over at the TRX, then at Julian, who was still making calls to other senators loyal to Hossel, seeing which way they leaned and judging whether or not tell them what Hossel had attempted to do.

  “So, just to be clear,” she said slowly, “you captured him, brought him here, and killed him?”

  “I did,” Kalder said. “But I got the confession out of him first. Julian here recorded it, and it’s been sent to the Vigiles. I confess that while I knew Hossel to be a perfidious man, I did not see this coming. Small wonder the entire Senate has not degenerated into such tactics. But I’ve spoken with the Two Consuls on it, and I’m assured that Hossel will be in custody within the hour, if he hasn’t already fled the asteroid. Won’t you sit with me?”

  He walked over to one of the compristeel chairs that hovered a few inches off the ground by repulsors. When he took his seat, he looked at the woman, waiting. She eventually joined him, her whole countenance showing naught but trepidation. “Will there be…an investigation? Or…?”

  Kalder nodded. “Of course, we’re not savages. Just politicians. We do things a bit differently than most. But I’m sure there are still a few recorders in the hallways that work, they ought to show that he followed me and attacked me. And there’s Trix’s recording system.”

  “But they might also show that you brought him here. Alive. And there he is. On the floor. Not alive.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Moira looked at him like she was expecting more. She probably was, but he could not be bothered with having to explain himself at the moment. There was business to take care of.

  “I’ve had a moment to look over the itinerary you sent over,” he said. “I confess, it is far more, eh, involved than I was expecting. But in a good way. Good work. Lots of stop-checks along the way, which will allow us to send out probes to ensure no Brood activity, and to conduct a bit of survey, perhaps snatch up a few resources from a comet or rogue planet before we arrive at Eaton. I’m also glad you found room for the stop at s’Dar, I would very much like to check out its Watchtower. It’s one of the oldest ever found, you know, discovered by the Faedyans. I’ve never had a chance to visit the site. Very good work.”

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes still flitting over to the corpse on the floor. “Well…you said you wanted an expedition’s path. And you called it a Crusade. In all my years of research, I’ve never heard of a Crusade lasting less than a few years. You’re going to need resources.”

  “Too true. And that’s exactly why I picked you. Didn’t I say so, Julian? Didn’t I tell you that she was perfect?”

  Julian nodded, still making calls, using whispertech so that he wouldn’t interrupt anyone else in the room.

  “I told him you were perfect,” Kalder said.

  Moira nodded slowly, her eyes still attracted to the corpse.

  Kalder needed to get her attention on him. He believed he knew how to do it. “Can you give me a history lesson?”

  She looked up at him. Blinked. “What?”

  “Stellarpaths are excellent historians, and I’ve been told you are one of the finest.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A man called Dannings, for one.”

  Moira brightened a little. “My…my Collegiate professor?”

  “Just so,” he said.

  “You spoke with him?”

  “I did.” Kalder waved over at the security bot standing near the door. “Eh, Trix? Could you please get us a glass of wine? Old Staz’s Reserve, if you please. It’s in the cabinet over there.”

  “Of course, Master,” came the monotone voice.

  The bot brought them each a glass, its hands stained with spackles of blood that had squirted from the assassin’s throat as both the bot and Kalder had tortured the confession out of him. Moira took the glass, sloshed it around, then took a sip. Kalder watched her hands, and was glad to see that they were steady. Though put off, the woman knew how to keep her cool.

  Kalder drank his down in a gulp, and set the glass on the table. He steepled his fingers in front of him, rested his chin on them and gave her his full attention. “Now, the lesson.”

  “What would you like to hear?” she asked. She took another sip, and over the lip of the glass, her eyes glinted with suspicion.

  “The Strangers. You studied them, didn’t you?”

  “Every stellarpath does. Some to their folly.”

  “Why to their folly?”

  “They study them too much,” said Moira. “It’s easy to become obsessed with the lack of answers.” She glanced once more at the assassin’s body, then finished her drink and played with the glass in her hands. “They’re the ultimate mystery. The Last Great Riddle, that’s what Dannings called them.” She smiled briefly. “The theories run wild. They came from another galaxy. They started at the Galactic Core, then branched out until they met the Brood and died—that’s why there’s no fossil record, they were all ground up and repurposed. They never actually existed at all, their remains are just the works of many different alien cultures and we’re confusing them as one, like how some people attribute all of Shakespeare’s works to several different artists. There’s a dozen more theories.”

  Kalder nodded, more because he was impressed she had heard of Shakespeare. Besides himself and his second Zeroist mentor, he had never met anyone who had heard of the man.

  “I’ve heard it all,” Moira went on. “And I confess that I believed half of those theories, at one time or another. The fact that there’s no fossil record of them really fuels the theories that they never existed.”

  “And what do you think now?” he asked.

  She looked at him. “I think they existed. Most people do now. But I don’t think they met the Brood. I think the Strangers died out naturally, became a smaller and smaller population, until there were only a few of them left to retreat to someplace, then maybe left the galaxy. The reason there’s so little left of their civilization probably doesn’t have to do with any need to hide, but something in their culture that was there all along. A need to clean up after themselves whenever they left, perhaps a ritualistic thing.”

  She shrugged.

  “That about covers it.”

  “Does it?” Kalder countered. “What about the Moon Scrol
ls? The Ceres Scrolls? The Athenaen Scrolls? And all the Scrolls that were found by the Isoshi and the Faedyans, long before Man ever made contact with either of those civilizations? What do you make of them? Are they Stranger-made, or something else?”

  Moira ceased fidgeting with her glass and set it on the table, then crossed her legs and rested both hands on the back of her knee. Adopting a real conversationalist’s posture now. She was in her element here, and enjoying it. “The Scrolls were definitely made by those who worshipped the Strangers, and not the Strangers themselves.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The writing, first of all. Each Scroll has the hieroglyphs on them. The Strangers were very thorough when they wiped the worlds of their works, leaving only a few husks, vacant starships hulls, and space stations with nothing inside them but dust. No writing at all. So they somehow leave these Scrolls with a clear alphabet behind?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.

  “Plus, the Scrolls appear to be star charts that were made specifically to map all the key locations of major Stranger sites. And then there’s the timing. Part of the job of any Scroll researcher is to look at the stars charted in each one, identify which star system the Scrolls were probably talking about, and, once we are certain, we determine how long it took, through natural stellar drift, for the star system to reach its current GLA. We subtract the difference, and that gives us some idea how long ago the Scroll’s chart was written. It’s called it backtracking, as you probably know.”

  Kalder nodded. “I used a number of other stellarpaths to do the backtracking on Moon Scroll IV before I give it to you.”

  Moira said, “Well, there you go. The oldest Scrolls were made 1.3 million years ago. The Strangers disappeared long before that.”

  “So you adhere to the Worshipper Theory,” he said.

  “Or some version of it, yes. The alloys that the Strangers’ structures were made of have still not be replicated, and they endure to this day with very few signs of decay. So that means they were highly advanced. But whoever created the Scrolls also made them out of something absurdly endurable. Both were advanced cultures, but one came after the other, and desperately sought to chart them. And since the materials that Scrolls are made of have been found nowhere else, we can only assume that the process to make such ceramic-alloys was extremely difficult, extremely rare. So if they reserved that process for these charts, then—”