by Chad Huskins
The tunnels became his home. It got so that he rarely ever visited the sensor station anymore. No one was coming to rescue him, he accepted that now, and it made dukkha easier to endure. It was just him and the tunnels and his memories of the Buddha man, which were already fading. There were days he could not even recall his proper surname. Had it been Alden? Aldrich?
Even more irrelevant were the memories of the days before he came to this planet. The war and everything before it was all just useless noise now. All that mattered were the caverns and the markings and the sepulchers and his meditations on them.
And dukkha.
Still, there was a part of him that remained curious about the old base camp where he and the Buddha man had called home, so Kalder did some digging through the old starship and found one of the bots that he and the Buddha man had broken down for parts early on. He found its battery, and reassembled just its head, torso, and legs. He propped it up at the sensor station and told it to come and find him at the cave site if any signal ever came. There the bot would sit for many years, keeping its lonely vigil.
Kalder scoured the caverns. It was no longer just a hobby or something to keep him busy, it was his life. It was his everything. Discovery became his goal, and the Buddha man’s words about slef-discovery became his constant companion. It was as though the Buddha man had never died. Kalder even saw him some days, and they talked and relaxed around a campfire, sharing a laugh and telling stories of things that never happened.
But Kalder still had to protect himself. The ebon shapes he had seen flitting through the shadows before…they were still around. And at times he heard their whispers. An alien tongue. Their words sounded angry, vengeful, though Kalder knew he was only assigning human aspects to them.
At times, they chased him. A few times the ghosts assaulted him in his dreams. He came to believe they had somehow left their mark on this place, impressions of themselves that would never leave. He kept a campfire going at all times, just as ancient man had maintained fires to keep the wolves at bay. These were his tunnels now; he had laid claim. He shouted at the ghosts that he could not help what had happened to them, he was sorry, but they were dead and gone and these were his tunnels now.
Once or twice he fled a creature half seen, dousing his torch to hide in the tunnels for a day or two, not eating or drinking or sleeping. He heard their whispers. They were looking for him.
They never found him. Because the day finally came when the bot returned to him. It came with a message. It had received a signal from a military vessel combing the outskirts of the solar system, and had replied. The Republican Navy had returned. They were coming to rescue him.
“JESUS,” SAID MOIRA, at the conclusion of his tale. “How long were you there?”
“Just under thirty-eight years,” said Kalder with a fractional shrug.
“What war was it you were fighting in?” asked Desh. “How long ago was this?”
“Long enough that, like the Buddha man, and all else that came before him, little of it matters now. Stages of our lives come and they go, quite like civilizations themselves. The items of greatest import are the sepulcher and the markings,” he said, holding up a finger to make a point. “What I found in those tunnels were markings that I would dream about for decades to come. I still see them, even when I’m awake, for I stared at nothing else for years on end.”
“You started searching for any other sites with similar markings after that,” said Moira.
Kalder nodded. “I did. There weren’t many on record, but after speaking with a number of stellarpaths over the years, and assembling accounts like the one on Dwimer, I have become more and more convinced of the Worshipper Theory. The Strangers came first, yes, but a million years later the Worshippers began following their trail. I believe the Strangers knew some truth, like the truth of the Buddha, and the Worshippers knew that they knew it, and wanted to know it themselves.”
Moira gave him a look of reappraisal. “This Crusade…it isn’t anything new to you. You’ve been on it your entire life.”
“Not my entire life, only most of it,” he assured her.
Desh cleared his throat. “What is it about this other planet—Dwimer, that’s its name?—that’s got you so excited?”
Kalder looked at him. “Recall that when I was in the cave, moving through the corridors, I found the markings that appeared to be a rendering of a night sky. Stars, constellations? There was something else in them. Moons. Two of them. And recall that I told you this planet where I was stranded had no moons.” He looked at Moira. “It struck me as peculiar, even back then. Until I tried to match the constellations on that map with the planet’s night sky.”
Moira smiled, and nodded. “They didn’t match, did they?”
“No, they didn’t. But LOG is full of vids and pictures taken of the night skies on ten thousand different worlds. Can you guess which planet has a night sky that matches the constellation map I found inside those caves?”
“Dwimer.”
“Precisely.”
“So it wasn’t just some ancient culture like the Aztecs or the T’dok,” Moira said. “The people who built those caverns weren’t ground-based, they were spacefaring. They got around. And the sepulchers of whatever planet you were on looked a lot like others you had heard of, like the one you sent me to in the Zhirinovsky System.”
“Yes,” Kalder said. “And at almost all of these sepulchers, Scrolls have either been found, or, if placed at the foot of the dais at the center of the sepulchers, have caused reactions, like what happened when you set the Moon Scroll down on the floor.” He lifted a finger again, making another crucial point. “And all of these sepulchers have been found on worlds close to Stranger sites, and only on those worlds. On the planet where I was stranded, an ancient Watchtower moved around in high orbit.” He nodded. “I know it in my bones: The Worshippers terraformed that planet, and it sat undisturbed for perhaps a million years before the Buddha man and I had reason to explore it.”
Captain Desh said, “But isn’t it possible that the Worshippers and the Strangers are one and the same?”
“No,” said Kalder and Moira simultaneously.
Moira looked at Kalder, smiled, and said, “The Strangers were scrubbers, they scrubbed everything clean. The Worshipper sites have plenty of markings, alphabets, sometimes even incomplete fossils.”
“Exactly,” Kalder said.
Desh said, “So…we’re doing this…all of this readying of fleets, and all this political hubbub, just to go exploring some ruins?” He shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m just glad to be out of the house and flying a ship again, but all this effort seems a bit much.”
Kalder nodded. He glanced over at Julian and said, “Would you please bring me the Tablet?”
Julian disappeared into the other room, the sanctum in which Kalder usually meditated, using some of the techniques his Zeroist teachers had taught him, and some that the Buddha man had rehearsed with him. Julian, Desh, and Moira all sat and listened to walls tremble around them as fresh water was being pumped up from Sublime Room 1. Pipes rattled overhead and water dripped on their heads. Moira shifted her seat to avoid the downpour.
At last, Julian returned with a heavy object wrapped in cloth. It was a perfect octagon. Laser rulers had revealed that its exactness of dimensions was unrivaled. Each side was a little over ten centimeters. It was made of an unknown reflective green alloy. Around its edges were markings that Kalder had seen in the caverns so long ago, and some of the markings were like those Moira had recorded on Zhirinovsky 373b. At its center, though, and on both sides, were incredibly detailed images that looked like they could have been drawn by a human’s artistic mind. Extremely perfect lines formed the accurate image of a broodling. A wide, roughly oval shape, with an opening at each end that looked like mouths spitting out dozens of tentacles, with portholes along the sides that looked like vacant eye sockets.
And beneath the broodling, standing defiantly an
d diminutively, was the face of an alien being never recorded. A weird, wide head, like a hammerhead shark’s skull, with six bulbous sacks across the middle that might have been eyes, sat atop a stalk-like neck. There were three slits at the base of the throat that might have been multiple mouths, or breathing holes, or ears, or anuses, or all four.
The alien had raised one six-fingered hand, holding a shining object that appeared to be pushing back against the broodling.
Kalder looked over at Moira, whose eyes were narrowing, and whose eyebrows were furrowed in intense wonder. “Where did you find this?”
“In the caverns,” he said. “It was one of the few things I brought back with me when they finally pulled me off that planet. I’ve not been back, but I’ve kept this close. Carbon dating puts it at a little over a million years old.” He ran his fingers across the object’s markings. “Did you know, on any normal world with an atmosphere, where the people have fled or died out, it only takes about ten thousand years for an entire civilization’s structures and records to be consumed by the elements? That’s it, just ten thousand years for everything to decay and collapse, for the winds and rains to erode everything, for the plant life to retake the world and for all foundations to collapse to time and gravity and neglect.”
He held up the object.
“But this…this has endured for over a million years. Just like the Scrolls. Thanks to whatever alchemy the Worshippers developed to make these rare pieces, we have a record, scant pieces left behind for the rest of us to find.”
Desh said, “You think it’s a picture of them? The Worshippers? You think that hammerhead-looking alien there is a Worshipper?”
“No, Captain,” said Kalder. “I think it’s a depiction of the Strangers, standing defiantly against the Brood.” He looked at both of them seriously. “But even if I am wrong, this Tablet is more than a million years old, which means that the Brood have been around at least that long. If that is the case, then it brings up remarkable questions. And I want answers. I want to know where the Strangers went, if they or someone else created the Brood, and if so, why.
“The Isoshi tell us that, eventually, all civilizations fall to the Brood. You may flee, you may try to beg or barter, but sooner or later the Brood come calling and they take your world. The Worshippers seemed to believe that the Strangers stood defiant. Did they survive?” Kalder shrugged. “Who can say? But we won’t know unless we thoroughly investigate their sites, and we start with Dwimer.”
“But why the Grazen site?” Moira said. “You’ve told us why you want the Crusade to start on Dwimer, but you still haven’t told us why the Grazen site specifically.”
Kalder nodded. “That’s because the story I told you is incomplete. When I left that planet I was certifiably insane, and it took me years to recover. Buddhism helped for a time. After that, Zeroism. My first Zeroist teacher listened to my story, and said that the markings on this Tablet reminded him of another story, one that he had heard long ago from a dead friend named Ruseth, another Zeroist. I tracked Ruseth’s family down, and pieced together a few things.” He looked at them. “I told you both, I’ve been working on this for a very long time.”
“What did Ruseth say?” asked Moira.
“That he had seen a Tablet just like this one, eighty years before he ever met my teacher. Ruseth’s family said he had told them the same, that he came across a Tablet, but that he called it the Codex.”
“Codex? Why Codex?”
“He said it could pick up on broodling frequencies, decipher them to the language of the user. In other words, it could detect Brood channels, and translate them to, say, English Standard.”
Moira shook her head. “How would this Ruseth know this?”
“Because he claimed to have gone on a pilgrimage with his Codex, tracking down the Brood’s fleets wherever they appeared. He said that the Codex interpreted frequencies sent by the Brood, frequencies that do not travel through normal space, but by some other means, perhaps quantum tunneling. He said that it allowed him to know the mind of the Brood.”
“What happened to his Codex?”
“His family couldn’t say,” Kalder told her. “But there was more to his story. It concerned finding the Tablet on Dwimer, at the Grazen site, and…other things.”
It didn’t seem like that was a good enough answer for Moira, who started to speak up. But, just then, she was cut off.
“Sir?” Julian said, stepping quickly to Kalder’s side. “I think you should see this.” He handed Kalder a holotab.
Kalder read what was on the screen, and shot to his feet. “Contact Pennick, and the Two Consuls! At once! Let them know we have to deploy the ships from Tenth Fleet immediately! And get me Brother Soreniz, I want his Repentant Designate on the line!”
“Yes, sir.”
Moira stood up slowly. “Kalder, what is it?”
He looked at her. “Phanes, Miss Holdengard. It’s swarming with an Ascendancy force three times larger than Second Fleet. They’ve flown directly into a trap.”
: SDFA Lord Ishimoto
Twenty ships punched out of their FTL bubbles at the limits of the system, and their crews raced through deceleration protocols. They amassed in the void, a conglomerate of crenellated hulls, sharpened bows, and tortured compristeel landscapes. Their superstructures and observation towers rose, regal and ominous, out of the darkness, only dimly lit by a star painfully faint at this distance. Blue-white trails of exhaust followed thinly behind them. Scant, random windows twinkled with light across the otherwise gunmetal hulls.
The cruisers were out front, with the destroyers just behind, and two frigates at the rear. As an interdictor with a working Pacifier, Lord Ishimoto was best situated at the tip of the spear, roughly a million miles ahead of the rest of Second, backed up only by one cruiser. Even as Lord Ishimoto pressed into the system, its sensors detected more than two dozen Ascendancy ships pulling back, skirting the far side of planets, or hiding behind moons. The enemy knew they were here.
Lord Ishimoto’s CIC was located in the conning tower. There, Captain Donovan pored over the first bit of incoming data. A veteran of twenty-six campaigns, Donovan had seen it all. He had encountered the Brood twice, gone up against the Teraxis Empire that now dwelt only in the Scutum Arm, and had contended with mass evacuations in the wake of the Ecophage. But in all his years, he had never seen a trap so finely set.
“Set Condition One,” he said.
“Aye aye, sir,” said Vosen, his executive officer.
Hatches all throughout Lord Ishimoto’s two miles of corridors were sealed, so as to give the ship maximum integrity. Men who worked damage-control were busy donning their emergency equipment—should they get hit and spring a radiation leak spring, or should the hull receive a tear, or a fire erupt, or an electrical problem crop up anywhere on the ship, they would be ready.
One by one, the “manned and ready” calls came through the speaker into CIC. “All stations report ready!” came the final call over the speaker. That was the voice of Andrei Vodovatov, their tactical action officer. The TAO was from Drohzensk Rus, too young to remember when his country was called Russia, much less recall an encounter with the Machinist Ascendancy. Most of the men following Donovan were too young to remember lots of things.
“Understood,” said Vosen, stepping away from a comm station. “Sir, Condition One is set, all stations report ready.”
“Weapons systems?”
“Turrets are online, and all four torpedo tubes are locked and loaded. We just need you and the CPO to activate Pacifier.”
The Chief Political Officer was a man named Mosier, and, besides Donovan, he possessed the only other activation key aboard Lord Ishimoto, as well as the codes that cued up the PaCFR weapons system.
Donovan pulled up a command screen that he had only ever used twice before. He punched in a twelve-digit code, which brought up another menu on his datascreen. He typed in another code, which opened a panel beside his tac display. He unbu
ckled himself and stood up, turning to look across the room at Mosier, who was strapped in and looking extremely worried. “Chief, I need you at my station.”
The CPO blinked. “Yes, sir.”
The man was more politician than sailor. He nodded absently, and unbuckled himself. He walked over to Donovan’s station. Donovan reached underneath his collar, and withdrew his key. Mosier produced his own key. They put their keys in the slots. They looked at each other and nodded. Donovan held up his fingers. On the count of three, they turned their keys simultaneously.
Two screens appeared on the tac display. They each put in their ten-digit authorization. A warning came up on the tac display, telling them what they were about to do. Donovan acknowledged it, and then keyed in a final code.
A distant hum.
A whine from beneath their feet.
ZAPS was being activated. The DLS/x1.22 particle accelerator was starting to excite. Fusion generators were allocating the appropriate amount of power. The lights dimmed in CIC, screens flickered on and off.
Pacifier had awoken.
The captain and the CPO retook their chairs.
As he was buckling in, Donovan had a moment. He was still thinking of Kennit. A lot of them were. A pang of guilt lanced through his chest as he realized that a lot of men of Second Fleet would face the same fate today.
“Radar, conn. Say position of nearest threat.”
“Conn, radar,” said Bingham, down in PPI control, his voice coming over the loudspeaker. “I’ve got a squadron of starfighters coming in fast, coordinates are at all stations now.” Indeed, he sent them to the NUI screens of everyone aboard the ship. “The squadron may not be headed for us, but scans show they have anti-ship capabilities.”
“Prepare countermeasures,” said Donovan. “Mr. Vosen, go for red.”
“Aye aye, sir. Go for red.”
In CIC, the standard lights went out, and the red lights came on.
