Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  “The Harbingers would argue that if it wasn’t a plague of machines, it would be a plague of us. They’re already saying so. That if the Ecophage hadn’t been heading there, if we hadn’t predicted where they were going, humanity would’ve already landed there, turned it into a tourist spot, and looted its resources for ourselves. A different kind of rape, they say, but still rape.”

  “Yes, well, the Harbingers can lick my ass.”

  “You want to put that in the press release.”

  Klein didn’t answer. He didn’t want to think about the Harbingers right now. Not ever again, actually, if he could help it.

  He handed his empty glass to a service bot, then stepped away from the cloud tracking center. He patted Doris on the shoulder. She had gone for six days without sleep, operating on go-pills alone, giving it her all to record everything she could. They had all done an incredible amount to record it for posterity. Maybe someone, someday, would figure it out. Maybe another James Pan. Maybe an alien race yet to emerge.

  Klein stumbled down the hall, headed towards his quarters. His head was already ringing from the alcohol. He had just started sending out a wave to all media outlets, with one or two choice words about he Harbingers slipping in, which he would probably forget by morning…

  …when he heard a collective gasp from everyone in operations.

  Someone screamed.

  Klein turned, his terror rising in him. He tried to rush back into the tracking center, but he was too tipsy, slipped and fell. He heard more screaming. Tried climbing back to his feet. Couldn’t.

  He knew what all the screaming was about. In his heart, he knew it was them. The nanites. The Ecophage. The cloud had turned around and was coming right for them. It was—

  “What the fuck is that?” someone shouted.

  “Get that on scopes! Now!” someone else ordered.

  “I…I don’t…”

  “Get on fucking scopes!”

  “What is it?”

  “Am I seeing what I think I’m—”

  “Record it! Record it! Record it! Don’t lose it!”

  Klein managed to regain himself, and guided himself back into the tracking center with one hand against the wall. When he came inside, he saw the center was abuzz with activity, people rushing past him, holographic windows opening all around him. He saw strange images on them, and bizarre data streams that did not relate to the cloud-swarm at all.

  Teeth, he thought, looking at one of the images. Teeth…

  That’s what it looked like to him, anyway. Just rows upon rows of rock-like teeth. They were on every screen, surrounding him like some menacing beast from a story. Someone had their hand on his arm. It was Iola. Her lips were moving. Speaking from a million miles away again. She directed him to the main viewscreen. He stood in front of it.

  And stared.

  Something was hovering over Pawache’s corpse. Something huge. Something beyond description.

  “What…what…” Klein said it several more times, before someone else’s words cut in.

  “Dr. Klein! The captain says we’re getting hailing calls! Non-belligerency has not yet been confirmed…it’s a man…he says his name is d’Arhagen, he comes to devour the Ecophage, and he brings…I don’t know what the word means. Sounds like…Magonogon?”

  : The Rogers Protocol

  The story moved slowly throughout the galaxy, and the Republican government did a good job in suppressing the images. The pubnet carried the rumors first, which were seen as an elaborate hoax by the Harbingers, who tried to spread it wide. News media ignored it, believing that the Harbingers were mixing truth with lies—they had images of the first two days of the Ecophage attack, but they did not have images of what they called the Divine Eater.

  The story could not travel fast, for the only way to get news across thousands of light-years of space in any manageable time was through the use of quantum-entanglement communication, and QEC transceiver/receivers were mostly only afforded on military starships. For events as monumental as these, which might cause panic, there was the Rogers Protocol.

  Five thousand years ago, when human beings first became aware of other intelligent races, some military general named Rogers had come up with the idea of controlling people’s perceptions, keeping them from knowing of the aliens’ existence before the aliens’ intentions were known. It was one of the reasons that QEC, no matter how cheap it ever became, would only be permitted for government.

  The Eyes On had just one QEC center, and was only attuned for direct military contact. All SOS calls went through military channels first, as did their reports of the Mega Organism.

  Primacy Intelligence received all images from the Merchant Research Fleet almost as soon as the event took place. What they saw was a creature far too large to be believed, chasing after the Ecophage, and disappearing into that cloud of silver and brown, mouth opened, devouring portions of it.

  The images of the Mega Organism, as well as the data that sensors had gleaned from it, were compared to that found in the anomaly at Darvishtapotyx 18941e. A file had officially been opened on the anomaly. A third of PI’s resources were diverted to finding out exactly what this was, whether it was real or some illusion created by an enemy. Theories were growing that the Unknowns had returned, or that the Ascendancy had produced a holographic projector capable of distorting the true size of the animal.

  As for the transmission that Eyes On had received, they were already running the voice of this d’Arhagen against LOG, as well as PI’s own database. No hits were found.

  All fleets were put on alert, and every fleet in that sector of the galaxy were asked to deploy a task force to inspect what was left of the Ratavastec System, and determine the veracity of the reports. The Crusade Fleet were the last to know, with the information being shared only with Captain Donovan and Senator Kalder.

  Everyone was reminded to adhere strictly to the Rogers Protocol.

  : SDFA Voice of Reason

  “Do you think it’s real?” Julian asked.

  Kalder sat in his cramped office behind his desk. In front of him was an array of holopanes, all of them projected to different positions around his desk in a giant circle. With each swish of his hand, the circle rotated, bringing another image to the fore.

  “It’s difficult to see it as anything but real,” Kalder replied. He pressed one finger to his lips, thinking. He nodded. “But what’s even more disturbing is that you and I both know the names: d’Arhagen and Magonogon. We heard them spoken by a man outside my office on Monarch.”

  Julian nodded. “We did. Do you think that person was trying to tie us in with this hoax?”

  Kalder looked at him, surprised. “You’re already certain it’s a hoax?”

  The apprentice laughed, and took a seat across from him, waving at the air and organizing his mentor’s appointments for the day. “Well, of course, sir. In one instance, it’s a grainy freeze-frame image of a scaly creature the size of a planet, and in the other it’s a shaky vid of the same-sized serpent hovering over Pawache and then flying into the very midst of the Ecophage.”

  “These images passed through Primacy Intel, the Hatfield’s own sensor specialists, and the scrutiny of a hundred scientists in the Merchant Research Fleet. You’re telling me they’re all wrong?”

  Julian looked at him. His smile faded. “I just find it difficult to believe such a large organism could exist. What would it eat? How would it survive? Christ, it would have to take shits the size of Monarch. Even bigger!”

  Kalder nodded thoughtfully. Yes, all those points did present problems. Indeed, he had considered them himself. However, there was another reality staring him in the face.

  He stood up, waved his hand towards the clearest image, which was taken by a probe that had been flying away from Pawache, returning to the research vessel Eyes On. With two quick waves, he expanded the image so that it covered much of the room, then waved the image over to the wallscreen behind him, and stared into the maw.
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  What he saw was a thing wreathed in smoke and dust, the remnants of debris left in the wake of the Ecophage’s industry. The monster was partially concealed in darkness, since it straddled Pawache’s terminator. It coiled many times over, with what appeared to be colossal flaps of flesh, perhaps even wings, that fanned through the dust. There was a head in there somewhere, maybe a tenth the size of the planet. There were dots and lines that some analyst had superimposed over the images, in an attempt to denote size, distance between scales, overall length, depth, and mass.

  Entirely too large to be comprehended.

  The longer one stared at it, the harder it became to deny its resemblance to a wyrm, with some jagged, bony extrusions that grew out of the thing’s spine and tail like natural volcanoes. The Eyes On’s sensors, which had been used to detect heat blooms within the Ecophage, found clear signs of heat blooms along the thing’s surface. Eruptions. Ejecta flung far.

  In the later vids, there were indications that, just before the creature had taken off for the Ecophage, the dust surrounding Pawache had begun to accrete around the Mega Organism, forming designs like planetary rings.

  In every vid, the serpent remained partially hidden on the planet’s dark side. Infrared imaging sent back puzzling readings, splotches of heat rippling across its body, yet there were cooler areas, with what appeared to be oxygen and cold winds. It had weather.

  “What was it the bald lobbyist called the creature?” Kalder asked. “The World Serpent?”

  Julian nodded. “I believe so, sir.”

  Kalder studied the images a moment longer. His eyes flitted over to the three stacked metal trays at the corner of his desk. At the moment, a lot of it seemed trivial, but the work had to get done, World Serpent or no World Serpent.

  The top tray was filled with piles of slinkplast with the most pressing matters, updates and requests from the Committee on the Continued Crusade, messages from his fellow Restorationists, petitions from politicians from the other two Arms, that sort of thing. The middle tray was reserved for any and all reports from his command coterie—Desh, Lyokh, and Moira. The bottom tray was filled with miscellaneous pieces, minor hiccups such as questions about their course or fuel levels.

  In front of him, Kalder held a letter from a senator named Bytyyn, an up-and-comer in the Restoration Arm. He was a populist leader, probably soon to become the party Arm Leader within a couple years. He wanted to know why Kalder had finally bent, why he had suddenly done a one-eighty and supported the Corporate Arm on its Proprietary World Rights Bill. And the audacity of me doing it without first consulting them, Kalder thought. Scandalous, I’m sure.

  He imagined a lot of what he had built over decades of staunch backing of anything the Restoration Arm put forth, and all the trust he had fostered, was already coming unraveled. Slowly but surely, with ends frayed like old string.

  A chime sounded, warning everyone aboard the ship that they were about to exit their FTL bubble and enter normal space. It was one of Moira’s scheduled resource-gathering stops.

  Thinking of Moira, he was reminded of her encounter with the man in the Forum. What did she say his name was? Thoom? Thulm?

  “Julian, where is Miss Holdengard right now?”

  PRITCHARD LET OUT a bark as they slowly pulled out of the Reason’s hangar bay. She eased past the grapplers, which were already extending out into the void and reaching for a platinum-rich comet.

  Edipastal 6687.22.38-r was its official designation. “Glick’s Comet” was what LOG had it as. It had a 157-year orbital period around the three stars of the Hu System. Thanks to the College’s deep records about the system, and Moira’s calculations of the main cosmic bodies throughout, she had pinned down an ecliptic coordinate system that brought them out of faster-than-light and practically right on top of it. That was essential, cutting down time for hunting and gathering. Every stop had to be precisely planned.

  “If I recall correctly,” Moira said, adjusting the yaw of her Series Seven, “Thulm mentioned the Tapir System. And two other systems.” She tossed Pritchard a treat, and looked at the holo image hovering off to her right. “Uh…let’s see…Vlodonsk and Xang, I think? He said you ought to look into them.”

  “Did he say anything specific that I should be looking for?” asked Kalder, his image flickering up and down as her shuttle’s OMS activated.

  She reached overhead to silence a small flashing alarm, and remixed her fuel. “He said there were ‘events’ there you might find interesting. That’s it. He was pretty insistent.” She looked over at the senator. “Why are you suddenly so interested in this guy?”

  “What else did he say?”

  Moira rolled slightly to starboard, activated RCS, then pushed forward through the icy debris. The comet was beginning its approach towards its three suns, and its volatile compounds—different ices, water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide—began to sublime. It was starting to develop its coma, or atmosphere, which spanned about 130,000 miles across. The liberation of all that dirty ice released tremendous amounts of dust particles, traveling with the gas away from the nucleus of the comet. Pressures from solar winds were just now beginning to pull the coma away from the nucleus, forming the elongated tail. That tail covered nearly three hundred miles of space.

  Moira was positioned above that tail. She and other shuttles were only going outside to allow room for the hangar bays to take in some raw materials, transfer it through cargo, and then pour it into the masticators, which would chew them up and feed them to the fabricators. Drones were being sent down to the nucleus to drill for the platinum.

  One of the drones had already landed, and confirmed the existence of at least one long-dead drone factory, which looked to have been frozen and re-frozen for centuries on end. Definitely a human model factory. We weren’t the first to mine this comet. LOG identified the factory’s design as belonging to a company called DeBanne Ventures, not in business for two hundred years. Moira could not find any evidence they had been granted the charter.

  Operating illegally then. Trying to start a monopoly out here. Probably desperate workers took the job, traveled all the way out here for the promise of a percentage.

  While she watched the icy-white tail of Glick’s Comet be illuminated by the suns, Moira tried to roll back the weeks and recall everything Thulm had said to her. “He said he didn’t come in the name of any religion,” she told Kalder. “He said he represented someone named…d’Arhagen, I believe? And that d’Arhagen didn’t claim to be a living god or anything like that. Thulm said d’Arhagen had been far and wide, and sought ancient secrets.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

  “I tried,” she said, deploying two of her own drones to go out and retrieve some of the ice she could hear tinkling against her hull. “If you recall, you cast it aside as more zealotry before I could give you more details. Then you told me about ghosts on Eaton, which you still haven’t clarified, by the way.”

  Kalder ignored all that. “What else?”

  “He said that d’Arhagen commanded Magonogon, a kind of wyrm, but much bigger. He called it the last World Serpent.”

  “Did he leave any way to contact him?”

  Moira nodded. “He did, actually. But you’re not going to like it.” She tapped a few keys, adjusted the course of her drones. “He said you could speak to him any time at the Baradosh, some kind of hotel on Monarch. He seemed pretty settled on staying there until he got an answer. But if he knows you’ve left Monarch—and I can hardly see how he could’ve missed that—then he may not have remained.”

  Kalder’s head disappeared off screen, and she could hear him saying something quickly to Julian, probably demanding he send a QEC communiqué back to Monarch, and send a Vigile or some other messenger to snatch Thulm out of his hotel room if he was there.

  When Kalder returned, he said, “I’m very busy for the rest of the day, but at some point I would like you to come to my stateroom for dinner. Ideally before we
reach the s’Dar Watchtower.”

  “Another group meeting with the Governor and the two captains?”

  “They’re not coming. It’ll just be you and I.”

  Moira felt the hairs stand on the back of her neck. Pritchard detected it, and pawed at her leg in a questioning manner. “Why just us?”

  “Because no one else will appreciate what I have to show you.”

  : SDFA Lord Ishimoto

  Artemis lunged with a speed that belied his great size. Lyokh responded by parrying, but then Artemis spun and came at him with a back swing, which Lyokh ducked and rolled underneath. He sprung up in a crouch, one hand on the ground, performed what Herodinsk called a “tuklaw” step, borrowed from Indonesian silat, and ran around the floor, his palm still planted on the floor, his legs running a circle around it until he regained his footing.

  Their swords met in loud metallic song. Artemis growled, laughing and yet also angered by his inability to tap Lyokh even once. Artemis had clearly been practicing, though, and he came at Lyokh with strikes he knew from Herodinsk’s own fencing style. But they were unrefined moves, repeated from memory, but not muscle memory.

  Lyokh parried, then shot in close, trapping Artemis’s wrist with his free hand. He tried to throw Artemis, but the man had too firm a stance. Lyokh pivoted, turning the wrist hold into a wrist lock, which summarily disarmed Artemis.

  “Damn it!” Artemis huffed, stomping away and wringing his wrists. “That’s the fifth time! When did you get so good at disarms?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  It was an honest response. He didn’t know when he had started focusing so much on such things. Certainly, Herodinsk had showed him a thing or two while focusing on his footwork, and surely he had been training new ideas on what were called strips—those disarms where the practitioner traps his opponent’s thumb or wrist, and strips the sword handle out using the pommel of his sword. But it had come out naturally today, without Lyokh having to think about it. And, as Herodinsk had said, one should never be finished as a martial artist, rather be in a constant state of becoming. Lyokh was becoming someone who was good at disarms, without trying to force it.