Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  However, that feeling was immediately tempered by the knowledge of tomorrow’s deployment into the Phanes System. He didn’t know what to expect. It would be his first time in an official capacity as wing leader. Inside the hive, he couldn’t have really failed at leading anyone because he was never intended to be the leader. The role had been thrust upon him, just like the honorific of doyen. Back there, they had all been pushing for the end, for survival, for the wall. They were all blood drunk, in the thralls of a disease known only to those in the thickest of pitched battle, knowing each moment might be their last and killing because there was nothing else to do besides crawl into a fetal position and weep.

  Deathlust. It had driven them. And perhaps as well the faint hope of waking up from that nightmare…

  But now, he was in charge. Men and women called him Captain now, and he would lead them, for better or worse, into another conflict, and he would order them to throw themselves at an unknown enemy.

  As he walked back to his billet, Lyokh thought about what General Quoden had said the last time he had been called to the carpet: Welcome to the Fall of Man, where everyone is unfairly promoted. Lyokh had hoped that that was just some of the gallows humor that got people through the day, but he had also taken it as a challenge to prove himself. And now, more than anything, he wanted to prove Gold Wing. Not himself, but the soldiers.

  If we’re going to be forced into positions we’re unqualified for, then we have an obligation to make ourselves qualified. For others’ sakes.

  This was a philosophy that had been slowly blooming in his heart, and he felt the need to exemplify it every day.

  He checked the clock in his upper-right periphery. Still a bit of time to swing by Herodinsk’s training room and squeeze in a bit of training.

  “WE’RE SUPPOSED TO put those on our armor?” Heeten said. Except for the silver-robed Orphesian helping her calibrate her warhulk’s servos, they were alone on the deck together. A few bots shuffled at the far end of the deck, checking in on Thrallyin. The wyrm was coiled and sleeping.

  Heeten was standing atop a ladder, elbow deep into the guts of her warhulk’s upper sagittal servos, sifting around and searching for a burnt fuse as Lyokh looked at his medal, still in its box.

  The Imperator’s Medal of Valor was a large blue ribbon with a single red stripe along its side. Three hundred seventeen tiny white stars lined its edges, representing the original human colonies brought under the single Skymich Empire established by Ard, the First Imperator, who was the first to try (unsuccessfully) to revert Skymich back to a full Republic. And at the bottom of the ribbon, swinging pendulously, was a palm-sized circular piece of bronze, at the center of which was a depection of Ard. His eyes, said to have been as blue as an ocean on Galene, were made of glimmering orcrest.

  For others, such medals stood for something. For Lyokh? He didn’t see the point. Physical items never really felt imbued with any special power to him. He understood it sometimes meant something to others who viewed you wearing it, though, and he supposed that was the point of General Quoden’s request.

  “I told Quoden we would do it,” he said. “So I guess we’re stuck with it.”

  Now Heeten stuck her whole head through the opening in the warhulk’s chest. Her voice came back muffled. “Well, I suppose I can find someplace to hang it from my hulk,” she said. She pulled her head back out, the tricky fuse in her hand, and descended the ladder. She gave the mech’s massive leg a gentle rub. “She’s such a pretty girl, I think a ribbon will look good on her.”

  Lyokh looked up the side of the warhulk, and saw that someone had painted the name Susi across its midsection, beside the Golden Seal of Second Fleet, and below the Sigil of the Republic. “Susi? That her name now?”

  “That’s always been her name, I just thought I’d mark her as mine,” she said, pulling her blonde hair back in a tighter bun. It had become loose and tangled. “There’s a shortage of supplies around here and I caught some other pilots trying to cannibalize her for parts. They thought she was one of the decommissioned ones being tossed for scrap in the fab room. This should keep their mitts off.”

  Heeten gave the mech another loving pat. Then she turned and thanked the Orphesian armiger with a nod as he finished his calibrations, and left them alone.

  Suddenly, a red light flashed three times, signaling that they were about to come out of their FTL bubble. Lyokh felt a slight nausea as they translated back into normal space. It was part of the planned stop at the Wahlstrom Asteroid Field, where they would collect a number of C-, D-, and S-type asteroids, to be fed into the ship’s masticators and transformed by the fab room into parts they needed to keep the ship running.

  “You ready for tomorrow?” asked Lyokh.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be, handsome.” She gave him a wink. “You?”

  He nodded, and leaned against the right leg of Susi. “I’m good.”

  Heeten leaned against the other leg. “Something else on your mind?”

  “A few things.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Like?”

  “You ever heard the name Kalder? Senator Kalder from Monarch?”

  Heeten nodded. “I’ve heard some stuff. But…I think he’s dead. Or was close to it, maybe? I can’t remember. I know that he’s old, that’s what he’s most famous for, probably. That, and being a real prick in the Senate. He lectures a lot, filibusters all the time, and he’s an unshakable Zeroist who is committed to the Old Ways. They have a saying about him: ‘Kalder does not bend.’” Heeten lifted a rag off the floor to clean some lubricants off her fingers. “What’s got you thinking about him?”

  “General Quoden asked me a strange question when I was called to the carpet. He said that PI wanted to know if we had seen anything strange inside the chamber on Kennit—he called it a sepulcher. I told him no, and asked him why PI wanted to know.”

  “And?”

  “He said PI got a tip from Kalder, said he sent a stellarpath to some system, where she found another sepulcher, and apparently saw some images or lights.”

  Heeten shrugged, and tossed the dirty rag over her shoulder. “I’m sure if it was important the Visquain would give you more details.”

  Lyokh nodded. “Maybe.” His gaze was drawn from her at the sign of movement. At the other end of the deck, Thrallyin’s whole body inflated, then deflated. The hatchling uncoiled itself, stretched, then coiled back into a ball as it settled in for the night cycle.

  It had done that several times already. Restless. Like all wyrms, Thrallyin could sense the tension in the crew, the readying for war. Gazing at the wyrm reminded Lyokh of the weird dreams he’d had of a giant purple wyrm devouring him…

  It also reminded him of the lull the entire ship was experiencing at the moment. That quiet before the storm. Only a few deck crews were out in the corridors attending to Lord Ishimoto’s needs, otherwise everyone had gone silent in their bunks. Trying to relax, surely, but their thoughts were surely as unsettled as Thrallyin’s slumber.

  Heeten said, “You’ve got that distant look. There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  Lyokh smiled. “You reading my mind?”

  “I can read you like a book, handsome.”

  “I’m just thinking about tomorrow, hoping I haven’t forgotten anything. I’m trying to think if there’s anything we neglected to train, anything we could’ve done better if we—”

  “Don’t do that,” Heeten said, pushing herself away from the warhulk and climbing back up the ladder. “We did all we could do. If you start second-guessing yourself now you’re just going to drive yourself crazy. It’s like back there in Kennit, or in any other op, we do all we can while we can. Afterwards, we can look back and analyze, learn from mistakes. But we don’t know what most of our mistakes are until we make them.”

  Lyokh looked at her. “Since when did you become a sage?”

  “I didn’t.” She lifted a plasma welder and tapped it twice against the warhulk’s outer shell. �
�Susi is. She’s the one with all the wisdom. Aren’t you, girl?”

  “Far be it from me to argue with a Dagonite.”

  “You would be wise not to,” Heeten said, sticking her arms through the opening at Susi’s left arm. “Susi’s been known to break a few bones when folks disagree with her.”

  Lyokh snorted, then pushed himself off of Susi’s leg and started to walk away.

  Heeten called after him, “Hey, when you get back to your bunk, make sure all your clothes are off and you’re all washed up.”

  He stopped. Turned. “What?”

  “I said make sure you’re naked and washed up. And…” She tapped her chin with a wrench, thinking. “Tie a bow around it.”

  Lyokh smiled. “Tie a bow around what?”

  “It,” she said, winking before closing her visor and getting to work.

  : Asteroid Monarch

  Pritchard was barking at the other ships he saw through the forward viewport. Moira scratched his nose, which usually calmed him down. He looked at her, wagged his tail briefly, then looked back out the window fretfully.

  Like all pilots on Monarch, Moira had received notification that the asteroid had reached max capacity. A bunch of refugees had come in from Muqin after a Brood attack and had nowhere else to go, and now Monarch had to initiate “reshuffle protocols” and try to play a stacking game, assigning ships to docking spaces for a more efficient parking. Not only that, but with Tenth Fleet’s shuttles now docking with Monarch, her Series Seven had been placed pretty far down on the list of priorities. Kalder said he would put in a word to get her bumped up, but so far it hadn’t done any good.

  So, here she sat, going crazy inside her cockpit and waiting to be reassigned a docking bay.

  “…demons…All demons…”

  Moira kept playing the recording from Eaton 19356f, known as Dwimer, sixth planet of the Eaton System. After doing some more digging she had found that, though no one knew who had first discovered the Eaton System, there were old half-corrupted records that mentioned it as far back as 1,200 years ago.

  Pritchard barked again as a shuttle came too close to theirs. It very nearly scraped them.

  “Hey!”

  She quickly scanned it. It was a food freighter, with a red equal-sign marking that labeled it part of the emergency relief. Moira transmitted on an open channel.

  “Attention, idiots! Keep to your assigned spacelanes and nobody has to die today!”

  She received no reply.

  Moira sighed heavily, and looked out her viewport at the massive asteroid.

  Seen from the outside, Monarch itself was a rather ominous lump of rock, roughly in the shape of a deformed potato, with one angry gnarled “southern” hemisphere that looked like a tumorous growth. On the surface were a few domed habitats, some of them clustered closely enough to resemble a small town.

  Located 3.2 AU from its star, the S-type asteroid turned so slowly that it wasn’t noticeable. Same for the dust and rocks that rotated out from its center in a kind of spiral.

  Trailing Monarch not even five hundred miles behind was Quelth, the small D-type asteroid, which was rich in water/ice. If not for the water taken from Quelth, no civilization could thrive on Monarch, for all the people of Monarch needed that water for more than just drinking. They needed it for fueling the engines that powered Monarch.

  There were all sorts of generators and sensors placed around Monarch’s lumpy and cratered surface; machinery that monitored air and energy for the asteroid’s citizens, as well as the space all around it.

  As Moira completed her eighteenth orbit around it, she became frustrated, she hailed Monarch’s flight-control and requested a landing zone. She had done this ten times now, to no avail.

  “Monarch Station Space Control, this is shuttle A-R-C-one-niner-niner-alpha-theta-six-seven-four-two-eight-seven, requesting a new hangar bay as per reshuffle order, over.”

  No answer.

  “Space Control, how much longer is this going to take?”

  No answer.

  She ground her teeth in frustration.

  Space around Monarch was filling up. Shuttles, freighters, and skiffs were arrayed around Moira’s shuttle like so much detritus. I guess that’s what we are. Human debris.

  Most pilots were doing like Moira and keeping to the orbital courses that space control had given them, and relying on their collision-avoidance systems to keep from hitting one another, but some were trying to fly outside of their designated lanes, hoping to jump ahead and snag one of the docking claws meant for someone else.

  Pritchard barked as a Windsprite came bearing down overhead, hovering like some predator ready to pounce. Looked like its pilot wanted to jump in front of her, attract the attention of one of the docking claws.

  “…stepping inside now,” said some ancient explorer of Dwimer. His voice came through the console in front of her, a recording of some centuries-dead adventurer trying to mark his discovery for posterity. “…through the main edifice at site location ‘Grazen.’ 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]…”

  Pritchard barked again as the Windsprite tried to edge ahead.

  “I see him, Pritch,” Moira said, activating OMS to move up slightly, and cut the shuttle off.

  The Windsprite flashed its running lights.

  “Son of a bitch is warning me away? Uh uh, don’t think so.”

  Moira became a bit more aggressive, changing her Series Seven’s pitch to put its nose just in front of the Windsprite.

  “…[static]…have to see this for yourselves. The people here…[static]…something went wrong. Might have worshipped…[static]…as gods, but not sure.”

  Moira leaned back in her seat. Pritchard jumped in her lap, and she stroked his back. She was getting bored out here.

  Looking out the window at the big deformed potato, she suddenly became curious about its population. A quick check of LOG showed no official census on the number of Monarch’s inhabitants, for humanity’s government had fled here quickly three years ago, running from the doomed Arbhadhi System and taking up residence in a mostly depleted mine. Since then, the asteroid had become a hub for refugees all over the Sagittarius Arm.

  “Wonder how many actually live inside there, Pritch?”

  He barked at her.

  “There’s a way to find out.”

  To pass the time, she asked the ship’s AI to perform a scan of the asteroid’s life-support systems. Based off of various life-form identifying algorithms logged inside the asteroid’s sensor stations, such as respiratory byproducts and molecule-chain EM polarization effects, the ship’s AI was able to estimate a population of about eighty thousand people, all bottled up inside the asteroid’s hollowed-out core and jagged corridors, which equaled only about twenty-two square miles’ worth of living space.

  “That’s a lot of people to pack in there, Pritch.”

  The Vac Hound let out a tiny bark that might have been an agreement, then leaned forward in her lap, keying on another ship that was edging too close to them.

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

  A chime came from her main control board.

  Moira didn’t get too excited, it was just a course correction coming in from Monarch’s space control station. She fed the correction to the Diogenes AI, which made the adjustment, then she relaxed back in her seat and did some perusing on LOG.

  There were a few spotty records about the Eaton System that had nothing at all to do with exploration. Old itineraries left over from ship manifests, those ships having been decommissioned centuries ago. Still, some history buff had been thorough, having found data logs from crusty old computer cores and uploaded them. Searching f
or key words on LOG was what had brought Moira to these old manifests.

  She scrolled through the holographic screens, her eye-flicks whisking away one page after another, through records of supply runs, field exercises, course corrections and navigational equipment malfunctions. Then, she paused, and went back a few pages.

  “…dead…[static]…all dead. They knew something…[static]…demons. All demons…”

  Moira leaned forward. She zoomed in on one itinerary, which belonged to a military craft from five hundred fifty-two years ago. It was from the ship SDFA Ichidarod. The SDFA stood for Starship, Deepspace, Fusion, A-drive-capable, and it was only given to ships of the Republican Navy. And that was significant, because five hundred fifty-two years ago, the only thing that would have mobilized the Republican Navy out that far was the Ninth Unknowns War.

  The Unknowns Wars were significant because they marked the nine separate times that the same unknown alien civilization had emerged in the Milky Way Galaxy and waged total war on all advanced species, but mysteriously fled before pressing too far towards the Galactic Core.

  Humans had not been around for the first seven Unknowns Wars, those had been fought long, long ago by the Isoshi, sometimes with a smattering of alien coalition forces that came together to fight off the scourge of the Unknowns. Humans had been somewhat involved in the eighth visitation, but had been one of the main driving military forces during the ninth war.

  The Ninth Unknowns War had been commanded by Imperator Ezek-ti, and had brought the humans to the forefront of leadership among the other known galactic civilizations. It had been a turning point for humanity, and provided a dim light of hope, just before the Fall of Man began.

  “So,” Moira said, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “This Ichidarod led a Republic fleet through the Eaton System at the exact time the galaxy was at war with the Unknowns.”

  Could that be a reason Kalder wanted to visit Dwimer?

  She needed a timeline to be sure, so she asked LOG to give her the dates. The dates of the first eight Unknowns Wars were only estimations, based off of ancient Isoshi texts, which had been shared with humans during the Ninth Unknowns War, when alliances had been quickly formed. Still, even though the Isoshi were an ancient race, long believed to be the first intelligent species to rise up to the stars after the Strangers left, it was impossible to keep records from that long ago. Too much happened over time, too much history, too much destruction and war, too much poverty and social entropy, too much regression into religious disputes, too many ruthless dictators and book burnings.