Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  The anger flashed white-hot in Lyokh. It was there for a split-second, then gone.

  “It’s not a combat mission, I don’t have to be present. I was planning on sending my Knight Companions to lead it. I would direct it all from here. Tsuyoshi and Ahlander know what they’re doing, and there’s no sign of a threat—”

  “Kalder said he wants you there personally.”

  Lyokh looked him over. “What for? Propaganda? Having the Hero of Phanes leading a brave expedition? Is that what this is about?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Kalder walked over to him, and spoke sotto voce, “I’ve done a lot for this man already. I’ve done the interviews, I’ve handled the reorganization of the—”

  “Kalder did you a great honor making you a Knight of Sol,” Desh said. “I’d say a few little interviews is the least you can do to thank him.”

  “He knighted us for his own glory. His own purpose. Just like he’s groomed you to take over fleet tactics, because you have flexibility on morals and duty, and so you’ll do whatever he says.” Lyokh snorted. “We’re both a couple of upjumped pawns for his purposes, and you know it.”

  “Yes,” Desh said. “But I’m comfortable with that.” He smiled, turned, and walked away.

  Lyokh didn’t like any of it. He didn’t like the familiar way Desh had clapped his shoulder. He didn’t like Kalder sending Lyokh orders through a man who was, technically, not even a member of the Republican Navy anymore. He didn’t like being told how to run his Knights. He didn’t like the command coming from a politician.

  It was a small thing, having Kalder tell him to lead the expedition personally, but it was also monumental in a way Lyokh could not have described to anyone not in his position.

  It didn’t feel right.

  : The s’Dar Watchtower

  Months ago, when Moira first sat down with Kalder to get an idea of what he wanted in the itinerary, the senator had told her that he would like a few stops here and there to encourage the “exploratory spirit” of what the Crusade was all about. That had inspired her to include in her itinerary stops that would involve the Strangers themselves. The first of these stops was not too far away from Taka-Renault, and it was called the s’Dar Watchtower.

  There were hundreds of known Stranger sites, and, at the rate they were found, it was estimated there were thousands more yet to be found. These days, the Watchtowers were considered some of the least interesting sites, chiefly because they were all pretty much the same, with few variations. Just long, tall, empty stations with rounded corridors and blank, featureless walls.

  The s’Dar Watchtower was in a patch of space first explored by a race of beings called the Dar’ha. The Isoshi said the Dar’ha still existed, but were sequestered to just some undisclosed star system, penance for some terrible war crime against the Isoshi.

  Moira’s LOG search hadn’t turned up much more than that. There had been a few pics, all of them disappointingly similar to all other Watchtowers ever found.

  She looked at it now from the observation deck. About three miles tall, hovering out in the middle of nowhere. There were no nearby suns to illuminate it, so its silvery-green exterior remained dark until the Reason’s searchlights splashed across it. It appeared no different than the Watchtower that had hovered in orbit above Zhirinovsky 373b, and yet each time she saw a new Watchtower was like seeing one for the first time.

  “It’s beautiful,” Moira said, admiring the smoothness of it.

  “It is,” Kalder said. “But the thing I want you to see is over here.”

  Moira pulled her gaze away from the Watchtower, and looked at where the senator was hovering over a table. Julian was there, too, in a corner off to himself, as usual, swiping at the air and talking to people only he could see and hear. Moira realized that, once upon a time, such behavior would have been seen as insanity, like a madman talking to make-believe spirits.

  Pritchard followed her as she walked over to join the senator. She was letting him move about the ship now, getting some much needed exercise.

  “Julian, if you would excuse us, please?” said Kalder.

  Julian made no reply, simply left the room and shut the door behind him.

  “Come, take a look,” he said to Moira. Kalder laid the Kennit Scroll down gingerly, as though it might break to pieces with so much as a careless breath.

  Moira sat down in front of the Scroll, and said, “Why all the secrecy?”

  “As I told you, the others likely wouldn’t appreciate it. Or, if they did, their commentary would only distract me from the only one that matters. Namely yours.”

  Moira was slightly taken aback by that. “I’m flattered.”

  Kalder said nothing to that, simply ran his hands an inch above the Scroll. And all at once, the room lit up like a celebration. Moira gasped. She had not been expecting something so abrupt. And the light show…it was all around her, exactly like what happened in the Zhirinovsky cave, complete with the designs that might have been alphabet, the distant thrumming, and, in the distance, the repetition of the strange alien tongue.

  “Dredda’dress’dresda’dredda’dreth’dreya’…”

  “What…how did you make it…?”

  “The Scroll is an Item,” said Kalder, standing up and walking around the room, his wrinkly hands reaching out to play with the light show. “Much like the other Scrolls, and like the Item I suspect our resident High Priestess had passed down through her family.”

  “An…Item?”

  “Artifacts designed to contain certain power, like the way compristeel can contain almost all forms of radiation. But there is a residue on each Item, a residue you cannot see, or even touch, but it’s there, and, with enough exposure to a person, it contaminates them.”

  Moira was on her feet, looking around the room at the lights, watching the blue, eel-like creature swimming through it all. “Contaminates them…with what?”

  “A base molecule,” Kalder said, turning to her. “A thing at the root of the universe’s power. Raw zero-point energy.”

  “Zero-point…?”

  “I’m going to tell you something, Miss Holdengard, and I want you to listen to me very carefully.”

  LYOKH HAD CHOSEN First Battalion to come with him, led by Tsuyoshi, and bringing Charon and Europa Wings with them, led by Meiks and Takirovanen respectively. Morkovikson was bringing his five best medics with him. Ahlander was keeping Second Battalion on Lord Ishimoto as backup, in case there was any need of a rescue.

  They crossed the half-mile-wide chasm between themselves and the ship, riding on the back of Rabastiik, and once they were close, Lyokh and his men detached from the clamps on the coil’s armor, and went drifting off into space until they activated their e-suit jets and made a formation. Lyokh led the way, moving carefully, gently nudging his controls to make minor course corrections, and never changing his delta-v once it was set. Rabastiik joined Thrallyin and two other hatchlings as they swam around the landing zone and searched the hull for any dangers. The wyrms looked like thin paper ribbons fluttering in the wind, and they disappeared entirely whenever they went beyond the searchlights. Lyokh only made the station out with IR and neutron-imaging.

  The stars were fanned out all around them. Uncountable. It helped not to focus on them too much, it could make a man dizzy. Just focus on the objective dead ahead, that was the way.

  There weren’t any windows—the Strangers had recognized windows as just structural weaknesses, apparently—but there were ways to get inside. Hatches, shaped oval like the rest the doors and corridors that typified Watchtower interiors, were scattered all over the main superstructure, which was shaped like a giant flat saucer near what they were calling the top. Because there was no atmo in space, there was no beam of light to go with the searchlights, just great big circles of light that moved along the hull, revealing its contours.

  After nearly five minutes of silent movement, they arrived at their location. Even with his gloved hands, touchin
g the surface of the ancient structure filled Lyokh with hideous awe. It was times like this when Aejon Lyokh could almost feel himself pull away in revulsion. It was that sense of the very old, crawling up out of the vastness of deep time like a leviathan that had slept long enough, and was now ready to stretch its legs.

  But the Watchtower didn’t wake up. It never would, Lyokh wagered. And that’s what made it all so ominous.

  He oriented himself, turning in space so that the Watchtower was “below” him, and then magbooted himself to the hull. He walked along it, guided by the wide searchlight from Lord Ishimoto, and the smaller searchlights spawned by the wyrms swimming all around.

  Lyokh walked a tenth of a mile before he came to one of the hatches. Diogenes had drawn up a map of the place, extrapolated from sensor probes that had already been here, mixed with floor plans that the Faedyans and Isoshi had in their records, and cross-referenced by current radar scans. The hatch at his feet ought to lead them to what Diogenes had labeled the Third Level Atrium Corridor. He knelt, grabbed hold of the two palm-sized levers beside the hatch, fitted almost perfect for humans.

  He turned it.

  The door slid to one side. Not an ounce of dust or debris evacuated, not even the slightest gust of wind. Totally dead inside. Had been that way for uncountable years.

  Everyone had their Fells in their hands, though they ought not need them. Soldiers felt naked on a mission without them, though, and it didn’t hurt to bring them.

  “Meiks, you’re on point. Takirovanen, set up shop out here, three-two-six with Abethik, and watch our asses. These Watchtowers are all the same, never anybody home, but keep an eye out anyway. You never know. Be prepared to tightbeam back to Ishimoto if any Ascendancy or Brood show up and jam our transmissions with the fleet. Tsuyoshi, get your SIGINT boys cueing up sensors. Ziir, drop me an EyeSpy in there.”

  “Yes, doyen,” they all four said in near unison.

  “Paupau, set up a relay to Ishi. The senator wants a record of everything we see and do inside, so he can include it in his report to the Committee.”

  “We gonna be heroes on the pubnet like you, doyen?” Meiks laughed, stepping up to black portal.

  “Probably. Let’s get a move on, Meiks.”

  Meiks deactived his magboots, stepped to the center of that black hole, and allowed the microgravity of the enormous station to suck him in slowly. A small excitation from his jets turned him so he oriented with the floor inside, and then Meiks reactivated his magboots. “Damn,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, just…never been inside one of these before. Never seen anything so empty.”

  As the others dove inside, Lyokh turned and looked at Lord Ishimoto hovering ominously behind them. Really, the best way to tell the starship’s size was by the large number of stars that were missing. It formed a colossal blank spot in the cosmos, a starship-shaped hole, with a few searchlights running along along amidships. There were other blank spots, too, a bit further off. The fleet, moving in darkness, like submarines in the sunless trenches.

  Once all his team were in, Lyokh stepped towards the portal, and took the plunge.

  “ARE YOU FAMILIAR with the Raven Paradox, Miss Holdengard?”

  Moira’s hands were still pushing through the light-show. She was surprised to see that it sometimes reacted to her touch, and that the things swimming around inside of it became clearer, like a fuzzy object in a camera’s lens almost coming into focus. “No,” she said distractedly. “I’m afraid I’m not. How did you get the Scroll to activate?”

  “I’ve been around a few Items of Power in my lifetime,” Kalder said. “The Raven Paradox is a very old one, and LOG won’t tell you who the first person was to speak it, but it suggests that a statement of one thing is a statement of everything. Any single statement of fact is a statement of all facts in the universe, but only if we match it with a logically contrapositive statement: we say ‘All ravens are black,’ and follow it by saying ‘everything that is not black is not a raven.’ Do you believe that?”

  Moira shrugged. “I don’t see how that could be true,” she said, waving at the pools of light.

  “If I tell you that all ravens are black, you might think the conference of knowledge ends there. Because, whenever we see something that isn’t black, such as an apple, this also must be taken as evidence of the second statement—after all, an apple is neither black nor a raven. A simpler example would be if I said ‘I live on Earth.’ That would be evidence that I don’t live on Venus, or Mars, or on the Sun, or on Luna, or in the Andromeda Galaxy, and so on. The question becomes, just how much information can a single statement imply?”

  Moira looked at him, wondering if this was going anywhere, or if this was just an old man’s rant. Then she remembered who she was speaking to, and knew that he did not just rant for no reason. I’ve seen him kill.

  “There is another thought experiment that says an object can only be defined by what it is not,” Kalder went on, pacing through the room, and walking through a curtain of iridescent light and looping designs. “A tree is not a tree unless it exists in a universe with other things. Other things for it to not be. For instance, a tree is not a rock, it is not an ocean, it is not a planet, it is not a star, and so on. In the end, we are only defined by the things we are not,” he said, lifting that lecturing finger of his.

  “What has this got to do with the Scroll?” asked Moira.

  “I’ve thought about this a lot, Miss Holdengard. I’ve wracked my brain for eons on this subject. I’ve been trying to figure out who and what the Strangers were, who and what the Worshippers were all about. I wanted to know what is the meaning of the Scrolls, and what was the purpose of the Watchtowers. What are they?”

  Kalder pulled out his holotab, made a few gestures, and summoned the live camera feed from the Knights of Sol. He waved his hand to shoot the images over to one of the far walls. Through the light emanating from the Scroll, Moira could see Captain Lyokh and his men moving slowly, passage by passage, into the depths of the s’Dar Watchtower.

  Kalder looked at her. “And that was my mistake. I shouldn’t have been asking what they are. I should have been asking myself what they are not.”

  Moira nodded slowly. “Okay, so…what aren’t they?”

  THEY PROGRESSED THROUGH the main corridor, following the map the Diogenes had laid out on their HUDs. They performed a series of crisscrossing overwatches in the tight halls, until finally Lyokh found himself at the front. Some of the guys held their rifles in high-ready, most went for low-ready. They were treating it like a tactical infiltration. Lyokh hadn’t even realized this until they had gone down several halls, then ordered his people to relax.

  “Ziir? Anything?” Lyokh asked, though he needn’t have. The EyeSpy’s relays were coming straight to his HUD and showing a dead, dustless world.

  “Negative, doyen.”

  “Everybody stay frosty, and alert. Check for structural weaknesses. The Strangers built these things strong, but you never know when decay will have its say.”

  It was eerie moving down one similar-looking corridor after the other, all of them dark except where their helmet lights shone. Twice, they came across structures that jutted out from the walls, almost like tables, where God only knew what kind of sensors had once been connected. They found almost no sign of outlets, though there were holes where the wires and circuitry had once run. It was incredible, knowing that the Strangers had so thoroughly gutted this place before they left it. And all other Watchtowers like it, he thought. What an absurdly huge task.

  “ ’Vanen, you still reading us?”

  “Loud and clear, doyen.”

  “How is it out there?”

  “Saw a couple of a rocks fly by. About the size of my fist. Otherwise, all quiet.”

  “Copy that. Tsuyoshi, anything from SIGINT?”

  “Negative, doyen,” said his Knight Companion. “Signals are clear. We’re inside a great big seashell, as far as
I can tell.”

  Lyokh led them down another corridor, and another, and another. The EyeSpy had gone far ahead of them, miles ahead, and was moving through many levels, mapping everything out using IR and radar, checking it against old maps made by alien explorers who first ventured here. The place seemed like a tomb that had been prepped to receive someone, some great king or other, but neither the king nor his trove of treasures had arrived. Quite possibly, they would never arrive.

  A chime sounded in his ear, and a flash-message appeared in his periphery. Lyokh blink-clicked it, and saw a message from Desh. It was a slight change of orders and mission perameters. He sighed. “All right, let’s stop here. We’ve got a new order from Kalder, he wants us to head to this room on the map,” he said, sending them all the update. The waypoint blinked on all their HUDs. “Meiks, take two guys and hold this hallway. Set up a short-range comm unit station in case interference from the structure hampers communication.”

  “You got it, doyen,” Meiks said.

  He did a brief check on the EyeSpy’s progress. So far, nothing.

  “All right, let’s go.”

  “IF YOU THINK about what the Watchtowers are built with,” Kalder said, pouring two glasses of Old Staz’s Reserve and handing one over to Moira, “you’ll find that they are always made of the same unknown alloy. Very strong, resists the touch of a plasma torch, nearly indestructible. The Isoshi have tried slicing pieces off, and apparently the Faedyans, at their height, tried nuclear explosions against a few of them. It’s proven a waste of time, only slight damage has been caused, so trying to cut off a piece to exerts far too much energy. It’s far too costly for military use, especially when other alloys have sufficed.”

  Moira sipped at her drink as she watched the lights dance around the room. Kalder walked through the light-show, seemingly not noticing it at all. Indeed, it all seemed rather boring to him.

  “We’re told by the Isoshi that once, pirates and warmongers of all sorts used some of the Watchtowers as hideouts. Entire militaries used them as stations. But, ultimately, their distance from any major strategic point in the Milky Way renders them sort of pointless. What use is an indestructible fortress in a system that is mostly barren? It’s like having a castle built to defend whole armies but with no river, lake, or ocean nearby—no food or water to be had, no resources to mine. Being what they are, the Watchtowers have served as stages for some of the greatest last stands in galactic history, all of them happening before Man ever bloomed his first solar sail.”