Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Zane’s eyes held his. There was the slightest of softening, so slight that most likely others in the room missed it.

  “Captain,” she said, speaking with cadence almost as alien as Faedyan. “Your words are welcome. And accurate. I am glad your forces arrived when they did. You fought bravely. I saw it all from my palace. We are grateful to your people for coming, and receive you with open arms.”

  Lyokh smiled inwardly. For him, handling zealots like this was easier than being called to the carpet by the Visquain. He’d grown up around these kinds of people. His family had been Christers, but they had been just as devout, and had their own priests that demanded respect, usually never earning it, and kept an entourage of feet-kissers and other simpering lickspittles nearby. The smarter ones would keep a tight inner circle, the command coterie that were the instruments of their leader’s will, sycophants that spoke with their leader’s voice when they were absent, and guarded the leader’s greatest secrets.

  That’s how Lyokh noticed the small, mousey woman standing just behind Zane. Her name was Myelic, and she had remained faithfully by her lady’s side from the moment she collapsed outside the Dexannonhold to the moment the medics whisked her away. Myelic, the Order Guard, the Iniquitous Incarnate, and the idiot hordes outside: these were Zane’s true weapons, not some strange piece of tech that distorted flesh. A weapon like that could be destroyed, or, if used too liberally, it could bring about the annihilation of the High Priestess. But the simpering lickspittles? The followers? The inner circle? They could create untold damage long after the High Priestess was dead and buried.

  Lyokh had seen it firsthand on Timon, when the Harbingers came and the Christers—his people—had transformed into something astonishingly vile.

  It just takes a spark.

  Lyokh remembered the spark that had ignited the fire of zealotry that had engulfed Timon. It had seemed innocuous at first. A priest’s suggestion that the Harbingers were right to feel the End Times had finally come, his intimation that if one wanted to surrender themselves to the Brood, it was not technically suicide.

  A few teenagers had absconded with a ship, and flown it into a Brood hive-city to offer their flesh. It caught on. Became a thing some kids were doing. Some parents tried to suppress the stories, worried it would become an epidemic among their youth. The more they tried to suppress it, though, the more it spread like wildfire. Before long, adults were doing it. A couple of people tried to stop them, and were crucified for it, their corpses taken on long voyages to Brood worlds and handed over.

  The Brood became seen as gods, or perhaps agents to God Himself. It was a strange blur now, resting many decades in his past. And yet when he looked at the High Priestess, it all came rushing back.

  “I cannot confine you to these quarters against your will, Wardeness Zane,” he said. “But I beg of you to stay. You are too precious to your people, and the loss of you would surely render the final deathblow to a city that is struggling to recover. Indeed, to the whole planet.”

  Zane considered these words. Lyokh already knew that he had her.

  “Are my thanes seen to?” she asked.

  “The ones that survived, yes.”

  “And what about my people that evacuated? Are they being taken care of?”

  “They are still safely stationed at L4 and L5, and I give you my word that the Visquain are doing all in their power to supply them with whatever they need.”

  “When may they return?”

  “I don’t have a timeline, but as soon as we are certain that all Ascendancy ships have fled and that there are no large squads waiting in the sublevels to begin an insurgency, you will all have your city and your planet returned to your sole control.” Remembering the purpose of his mission here, he added, “If that is your wish. We will also stay for as long as you need.”

  Zane considered him a moment longer, those feral eyes losing none of their intensity.

  “I am not so vain that I do not consider the advice of foreigners, especially those that have fought and died for my people.” She nodded. “I shall remain under your guard, Captain Lyokh, with your thanks. But I must insist that it not be in such cramped environs.”

  “I’m sure we could arrange somewhere that’s—”

  “What about one of your starships?”

  Lyokh looked at her. That was a strange request, but he wasn’t so sure it was off the table. Before Vastill had become an embattled hellhole, Gold Wing had originally been ordered to deploy here and simply patrol and support the city guard, while securing the High Priestess.

  The situation had changed, to be sure, but his last report to the Visquain had confirmed to him that IX Legion’s overall objective was still the same: Defend the Phanes System so that the politicians could broker a deal for trade, to help feed the starving and failing Republic.

  “You would want to remain in orbit on one of our ships?” he asked.

  “That is where your Visquain is, is it not?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then I would like to be stationed there, where I can oversee everything.”

  “With respect, Wardeness,” Lyokh gambled, “wouldn’t it be better if you were here, on the ground, to attend to the daily matters of state? Surely you must have all sorts of logistical problems that require your immediate attention, and your headquarters and personnel resources are all down here.”

  “With respect to you, Captain,” Zane returned, “I feel it would be best to speak face to face with your Visquain and political leadership. And you said your wish was to keep me safe? Well, what safer place than a Republican starship?”

  Lyokh started to counter by saying there were possibly still enemy stealth ships in orbit, but he was interrupted by a chime. A flash-message from General Quoden himself, which he saw via his imtech. He blink-clicked it, read it, and snorted out a laugh. “Looks like all this arguing is moot. Someone must have gotten word to Lord Ishimoto that you’re awake, because you’ve been invited to join them in orbit.”

  “Who asked for me? Specifically.”

  “Both the Visquain and the Crusade leadership.”

  Zane tilted her head. “Crusade?”

  “Yes, Wardeness, mankind is about to embark on a great quest,” he said, with an ironic smirk. “And the leader of the Crusade has just arrived. Senator Holace Kalder has asked you and I both to join him.”

  : Darvishtapotyx 18941e

  Lieutenant Kaipalla pulled back slightly on the controls, coercing the greatwyrm to expand his wings. The solar energy was captured by the external panels along Urushtagok’s armored flaps, and his red scales rippled while his whole body shivered in response to the transfer to its subcutaneous solar cells. It never ceased to foster in Kaipalla a sense of awe whenever a wyrm absorbed power into its cells. You could actually see the power transference rippling through its scaly flesh, follow those ripples first along its transverse plane, into its main battery chambers, then along its coronal and median, finally into its dorsal guns.

  Urushtagok was a greatwyrm, having sprouted extra wings and clawed arms some one hundred years ago when he hit his final growth spurt, shedding the skin of his old dragon-sized self. From head to tail he was five hundred feet long, with twelve sets of wings along his body and half as many clawed limbs. Kaipalla had piloted him for the last two decades, along with a crew of gunners and sensor specialists.

  All these people were housed in the sensor suites shaped like bubbles that lined Urushtagok’s body, and were welded to the compristeel plates that were surgically and chemically bonded to his man-sized scales.

  Currently, Urushtagok led a complement of anguises and hatchlings over a cold, dead world. They had deployed from the Melissa P.H. Hatfield, a Scythe-class devastation ship charged with leading a task force to chart the movements of the Brood in this sector. So far, the broodlings had held at the edge of this system, but once or twice had sent smaller ships to Darvishtapotyx 18941e to sniff around, as if they found something noteworth
y about the Type-C rocky world.

  “Urushtagok Actual, this is Hatfield conducting radio check,” a voice said in Kaipalla’s ear. “How do you read? Over.”

  Kaipalla looked at his screens, and leaned back in his chair to tap a few keys, giving some fresh coolant to Urushtagok’s portside vanes. “Hatfield, this is Urushtagok Actual, I read you five-by-five. Over.”

  “Copy that. Command is looking for a status report.”

  “Just finished our second orbit around the planet, and we are about to commence our first low sweep over the surface. Decelerating now, turning our boy’s head planetward. Falling to an altitude of five thousand feet. Gonna let him stretch his wings a bit. I’m going to leave two hatchlings in LEO to maintain sensor dominance. Over.”

  “Understood, Urushtagok. Will report that to Command. Happy flying. Over.”

  Kaipalla’s fingers moved quickly across his keys, sending requests for updates from the other sensor suites embedded across Urushtagok’s body. He knew the Tamer crew hated him for it, but he ran a tight ship, and had survived for decades because of it.

  18491e had no atmosphere to speak of, so there was virtually no resistance as Kaipalla dipped the greatwyrm’s head towards the surface. The planet loomed large in his main viewscreen, its icy, white-and-gray surface was pocked with thousands of impact craters, with two of them being so large that they basically defined its surface. Those craters, called Terantu and Ursula, were as big around as moons. Some catastrophic event in 18491e’s past had left these scars. Some believed the presence of Xenon-129 indicated an echo of some past superweapon that had fired on it some billion years ago. According to the Isoshi, no known weapon in galactic history had ever had such power, yet it remained a theory.

  Some believed that Terantu and Ursula were simply leftover scars from an ancient attack by the Ecophage, that cloud of nanites and fist-sized drones that wandered the cosmos aimlessly, feeding off of resource-rich worlds. The Ecophage’s origins were unknown, but their methods were well documented. Their feverish work to devour a world’s most valuable resources, and transforming them into more nanites and drones that swelled their deadly cloud, was known to heat the surface of a planet by many thousands of degrees, which might have helped them to shape the craters of 18491e.

  All of that was speculation, though. Just like everything else that came before the Galactic Rise of Man.

  Urushtagok flew low over the mountains at the southern edge of the Ursula crater, those mountains being the result of the ancient impact itself. There were old sensor outposts along those ridges, left there by the Faedyans some five hundred years ago. They mostly remained unmanned, but still, they worked, sending out regular sensor pulses every fifty-three minutes exactly. Could this be what attracted the Brood to this system? Some in Primacy Intelligence thought so.

  Kaipalla tended to believe the Brood had no motive for being here. He thought of them as random grazers, checking out this system and that one. They were a long-lived mass of techno-organic organisms working together, and therefore had all the time in the universe to thoroughly investigate every nook and cranny of any solar system.

  Kaipalla’s right hand tapped the attenuator, and suggested a new course for Urushtagok, who banked softly to starboard. The change in speed and direction pressed him against his cushioned seat.

  “Tamer Main to Sensor Suite Four,” Kaipalla said. “Go active with full sweep, make sure we’re not being targeted. Those stations down there are old, but they might still have active defenses.”

  “Suite Four copies, Main,” a female voice said.

  He watched the feed from the external cams. Darvishtapotyx’s post-main sequence star was burning bright and large. It had entered its helium burning phase over a billion years ago, its radius becoming 180 million miles across, while its mass continued to drop. Two Watchtowers orbited the star, but they were so close to it that no one had ever been able to venture to them—they remained one of many Stranger sites never explored.

  Just as well, Kaipalla thought, checking the overheating in one of Urushtagok’s vanes. They’re probably as dead and empty as any others.

  There was a beep at his console. More news. Kaipalla liked to keep track of what was going on around the galaxy, he followed politics pretty closely, and was watching the developments of the Crusade with great interest. He had loosely followed the career Kalder for years, and was intrigued to see him aligned so heavily with a major military effort, and one that included the Hero of Kennit himself, Aejon Lyokh.

  A lot of overblown talk, he figured, remembering his own brief brush with fame. He and his fellow Hatfield Tamers had once been the focus of many documentaries, due to their run-ins with pirates in the Obo System. He looked at Lyokh’s image on the news vids, and smiled as he thought about how uncomfortable the man must feel at that moment.

  Another face popped up on the screen. It was the poet Ram-Mexst Arpool, who was discussing Lyokh’s symbolism to the people, and defending his own now-famous 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.” Words he had spoken when fleeing Muqin’s destruction.

  “Do you regret those words now?” an interviewer said. “Especially since they’ve been picked up by Harbingers and used in their propaganda?”

  “I simply responded naturally,” Arpool said. “Muqin is—was—a beautiful world. I had just watched the destruction of everything I believed immutable.”

  Just then, a voice, filled with slight alarm, spoke into Kaipalla’s ear, “Uh, Main? Suite Two here. I’ve got a weird spike bremsstrahlung. Large spike, showing gain. I’ve checked with Hatfield, but her scopes don’t see it.”

  Kaipalla’s brow furrowed. A knot formed in his stomach. He leaned forward in his seat and waved at the sensor screen to see the readings. By gain, the sensor specialist meant it was accruing higher frequency values.

  Meaning if it’s not just a sensor ghost, then it’s something headed in-system.

  “Inform other Tamer teams,” he said. “See if they see it. Hatfield may just be blind to it because she’s near the south pole. Give me a wider active spread. Comms, make sure Hatfield knows we’re going active. Weapons Chief, give me dorsal guns hot.”

  “Dorsals cueing up, Main,” said the chief.

  “Tactical, I’m putting us on a steady incline. Give me wings-out, defensive posture.”

  “Copy defensive posture, Main.”

  “Urushtagok! Sinfir unt’a veigt unrakhit!” Speaking dracun wasn’t strictly necessary, but it sometimes helped the wyrms understand better the requests that were being fed to them by electrical impulse. Radio implants around their cochlea let them hear their Tamer’s words clearly, and the reaction was instantaneous.

  The great undulating mass of the space serpent assumed a new form. Urushtagok’s wings, usually open to take in as much solar energy, curled inwards to make himself a smaller target. As he elongated his body to make himself more aerodynamic against the planet’s weak atmosphere, his parasagittal thrusters pushed him into higher orbit, pressing Kaipalla and his teams into their seats.

  The hatchlings that had followed Urushtagok down to the planet now copied his form in a choreographed ballet. Once in proper orbit, they all curled their tails and bodies into balls, and all engines went silent.

  “Tactical, let’s put on our shroud.”

  “Copy, Main. Putting on our shroud.”

  The 5s-Phantom/Z sensor shroud was the latest in wyrm flock protection. It had a short-range sensor jammer, along with a DERP (dedicated energy receptor projector), which not only soaked up radiation at long range, but could also link up to a nearby friendly starship’s sensor analysis grid. It also had an active jammer in the form of the full-spectrum distortion projector, which not only scrambled incoming signals, but painted a target and then jammed its outgoing transmissions.

  The hatchling complement activated their own shrouds, but they had also been gen-enginee
red with the pigment-changing chromatophores in their scales. After a single wave of blue energy rippled their bodies, the hatchlings became an invisible mass, only distinguishable at close range.

  Greatwyrms were far too large for the chromatophore treatment, so Urushtagok remained the only visible member of his flock.

  Kaipalla looked at all his screens, at the great black nothingness, at the dying star, at the crumpled, two-mile-wide rock that was 18491e’s only moon, an extrasolar capture that Hatfield’s Diogenes predicted would crash into the planet’s surface in ten thousand years. Besides these normal cosmic sights, there was nothing unusual about the patch of space they were in.

  Save for the occasional chime signaling an update from the suites, all was quiet.

  At times like these, Kaipalla always had the same recollection. As a boy, he had hidden from both his parents when they came home. Dad was a drunk who didn’t like to be bothered, and Mom was physically abusive to him and his brothers. Kaipalla remembered leaving school every day and going home to an empty house. Dad was out working, Mom was…doing whatever she did. He remembered hearing their vehicles pull up in the driveway at night, the crackling of gravel beneath tires, the feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach as he waited, under his bed sheets and in the darkness, wondering if they would come inside to take out their stress on him.

  This felt like those nights. Sitting here, waiting for something dreadful that might happen. But Kaipalla was no coward at times like these. Indeed, he had finally stood up to both his parents, and rather than fear the silence in the darkness, the silence that came before the storm, he had embraced it.

  So, when the alarms started blaring all around him, his hands reacted with the speed of one ready to engage.

  An Isoshi ship. It had appeared suddenly on his screens, coming out of warped space a few hundred thousand miles ahead of them, but continuing forward at breakneck speeds. Isoshi ships were long and cylindrical, flattened into cliffs at each end, and with hundreds of turrets ringing the cylinder. The thing was eight miles long, and clearly damaged.