Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  “It’s now twenty miles and some change in height. Half as wide. I hear there’s a real light show going on inside, like interactive displays, with weird strings of symbols, numbers or letters. The theory now is you rebooted a Watchtower.”

  Durzor tapped his thigh, and Lyokh accepted a glass of water from him, along with four pills of different colors.

  “How you feeling today?”

  “Better,” he said. But “better” was kind of misleading. He didn’t mean “all the way better” just “better than I was yesterday.” He looked at his hands. They weren’t shaking anymore, so that was good. The first day he woke up in Mercy’s Caress, he had trembled so badly he thought the ship was under attack.

  “Glad to hear it, because the docs are waiting for a report from Morkovikson’s people. If you’re up for it, there’s a briefing you’re meant to attend, with some big announcement and a plan for what to do about Taka-Renault.”

  The world lurched for a second. He gripped the windowsill until the spell passed. The spells were getting less frequent with each passing day, his experience fading millennia by millennia.

  Lyokh closed his eyes and tried to remember everything he had seen. It was all a blur now, what had felt like billions of years was now compressed into a summary file inside his brain. Planets dancing around two stars, one white and one blue. Gas giants, comets pounding a lifeless planet, animals rising up out of primordial goo, mass extinctions, wyrms…all of it had faded into one general feeling.

  Time.

  Though the vision was fading, the impact of his feeling on time was barely diluted. He could no longer recall every single second of the experience, but his mind had tremendous new perspective. So much was fleeting. Names and places—such as Timon, Eulekk, Lucerne, Harbinger, the Knights of Sol, Heeten—were now seen as things meant to be fleeting. Their transience was woven into the fabric of the universe as mass and energy. Laws. The way things were. Nothing you could do about it.

  And yet that lent all other experiences as precious. Every breath, every thought, every moment of life, was something to be cherished. Lyokh had roared into battle with a deathlust, accepting the Fall of Man as his own fall. Fated. Irreversible.

  But what he had seen…it was genesis. It was the struggle of life. Death might come at any moment, but that didn’t mean you had to act like a robot and merely wait for the time to run out, for the factory warranty to expire. The world he had seen had been filled with things come and going, coming and going, an endlessly violent cycle that brought about change. Positive change. Change that ensured the next stage of life survived. All life was part of this vast and necessary cycle, always transforming into something else. Never “arriving,” never hitting an endpoint.

  In a constant state of becoming, Lyokh thought.

  “Give me a rundown, Knight’s Hand,” Lyokh said, shaking the philosophical ruminations off. “And let’s do it while we walk. Well, I’ll walk, you roll.”

  Durzor wrote on an imaginary tablet. “Sense of humor? Check.”

  They started down the hall, Lyokh feeling better with each step. He tied his gown tight to him so as not to give anyone a show. Contrite brothers walked by him, bowing low, but never speaking to him.

  Meiks and Takirovanen were sitting just down the hall, playing each other on a chessboard. It was the only game the contrite brothers were allowed.

  “Well, hello beautiful,” Meiks said, standing up. “Did you sleep well?”

  “I don’t know about well, but I slept,” Lyokh shrugged, accepting the clap on his shoulder.

  “You been in and out a few days. We were getting worried about you.”

  “Several,” said Takirovanen.

  Meiks looked at him. “What?”

  “A few is three to five. Several is anything seven or over. He was in and out several days.”

  Meiks looked at Lyokh. “See what I put up with? While he cheats at chess—”

  “En passant is not cheating, it’s a fair move.”

  “—he lectures me about how people are using the whole English language wrong.”

  “Almost all people,” Takirovanen clarified.

  “Christ, you’re like my mother and my fifth-year teacher all rolled into one. Please don’t tell me you slept with the janitor at my school, too—”

  “I would ask how you’re feeling, doyen, but I understand that that’s the question people hate most when they’re feeling ill.”

  “Thanks, ’Vanen,” said Lyokh. “I’m good. Let’s all walk for a bit. Durzor was just bringing me up to speed.”

  Mercy’s Caress was basically a giant laboratory with five guns mounted to it. It was about half the size of Lord Ishimoto, but appeared cleaner, more refined. It had few med bots, but it didn’t look like the contrite brothers needed them. These weren’t just wet labs, they were fully furnished, glimmering, and sterilized rooms filled with spectrophotometers, centrifuges, shakers and mixers, operant conditioning chambers, incubators, freezers for frozen cell cultures, sequencing instruments, a virology department, even a BSL-7 chamber for handling potentially lethal pathogens.

  “Ramlock and Ark came back with these,” Durzor said, waving images to Lyokh’s personal tab, which then relayed the images to his lenses. “Ramlock’s sensors picked up the broodling drifting in the Oort cloud. Lots of debris orbiting it. The amount of debris suggests it’s been floating there a thousand years or more, the analysts say.”

  Lyokh scrolled through the images, looking at the dim heat signatures of the broodling. A mile long, six tentacles clearly intact at the front, maybe seven coming out its arse.

  “It’s dead?”

  “That’s what Ramlock said. Immobile. They even went sensor-active to see if it did anything. Nothing.”

  “That’s rare. You never see these things adrift. A dead one is usually scooped up in a matter of days.”

  “Ramlock and Ark also made contact with the people of Taka-Renault. Seven different governments are sophisticated enough to pick them up on sensors—they have basic starship designs, and couldn’t make the flight out to the edge of the system. They told Ramlock’s captain that they knew about the broodling. They’ve known about it for about eight hundred years, but haven’t been able to do anything about it.”

  Lyokh was impressed. “They were actually able to talk to one another? The Takans could understand the people on the Ramlock?”

  “The language templates that Diogenes worked up were a big help. They took old recordings of the initial settlers of Taka-Renault and made predictions. Some of their extrapolations were pretty close. Close enough that, once the dialogue started back and forth, Ramlock’s captain was able to have a civil conversation.”

  “I spoke to one of the deck officers on Ramlock,” Takirovanen said. “He said they surveyed a few planets and moons. Looked like a terrible war had scarred the place up. They estimated seven hundred years ago, these people went to serious war with each other.”

  Meiks nodded. “Sensor guy I spoke with said they found the debris of hundreds of starships littered all around the fourth and seventh planet, and around a bunch of moons, too.”

  Durzor nodded. “They’re officially recovering from a self-inflicted apocalypse.”

  “Well,” Lyokh said, “that solves our Romulus and Remus Problem, doesn’t it? They can’t be a threat if they can’t fight us.”

  “There were some minor hostilities, though. Kalder wants to talk to you about them.” Durzor rolled in front of Lyokh, then spun around to face him, stopping him in his tracks. “I know you’re pissed. You woke up a few times saying you wanted to punch that son of a bitch. You think he put you in a trap.”

  “He put us all at risk,” Lyokh said. “And I’m convinced he knew something would happen.”

  “How would he know that?” Meiks asked.

  “I don’t know how, I just know.”

  “Doyen is right,” Takirovanen said, leaning against a wall and folding his arms. “He suddenly insisted that th
e captain take command, even though he needn’t have. Then he sent us the update to our maps, telling us exactly where to go.”

  “If that’s true, then why didn’t he just tell us beforehand where we were going?”

  Lyokh said, “I don’t claim to know his mind, but if I had to guess, it was to avoid too many questions. Forcing me to lead after I had already decided to send Tsuyoshi as leader was one thing. He wanted to avoid confrontation. If he’d brought up the location he wanted us to go to in a briefing, I might have asked more questions. ‘Why there? Do you expect there to be something significant about that location?’ Things like that.”

  Takirovanen nodded. “Better just to send it as an update. Not like we could just turn around and go have another briefing.”

  “But how could he know that would happen to you?” Meiks asked again.

  “Minds like his are made for meddling, and for keeping secrets,” Lyokh said. “He knew.”

  “If that’s true, and he didn’t tell us, he put us all at risk. For Christ’s sakes, I saw you blink out of existence for nearly seven whole seconds.”

  Lyokh knew that. He had seen the footage. The cam footage from his team’s helmets had shown him staggering around, nose bleeding, vomiting inside his helmet. Seconds later, as Morkovikson reached for him, Lyokh faded, then vanished. Almost seven seconds after that, he rematerialized on the other side of the room, screaming and going into shock, muttering about the Fire Birds and the Star Children, asking to see Artemis.

  That’s the only way Lyokh knew that what he had experienced had been real, and not just some psychotic episode. Vids showed him blink out of existence. Lyokh had definitely traveled.

  “When’s the briefing for Taka-Renault?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow, if you’re feeling up to it,” Durzor said. “Kalder says he’s fine letting you rest, and having Tsuyoshi in your place, if that is your wish.”

  Oh, yeah, sure, now he’s willing to let me sit on the sidelines. Now he’s fine with Tsuyoshi taking front and center. After he already sent me in as bait. But why me?

  “I need to talk to him before the briefing.”

  Takirovanen said, “You ought to be subtle about it. Direct confrontation may only make things worse. Politicians don’t respond well to bluntness.”

  “I can do subtle,” Meiks said, cracking his knuckles. “I’m good at subtle.”

  Lyokh looked at him. “A second ago you sounded like you doubted all this.”

  “Yeah,” he said, glancing at Takirovanen, “but apparently I’ve been confusing lay and lie my whole life, so what the hell do I know?”

  : SDFA Lord Ishimoto

  Lyokh walked slowly towards the sleeping beast. This close, he could feel its breathing in his chest, maybe even its heartbeat. Its lidless eyes gazed out at him, tracking him, even though it was asleep. Every once in a while, an opaque membrane flashed across the eyeballs, side to side, then retreated back into the head. Its scales, woven with heavy plate, shimmered in the dim lights of the Orphesian mechanics working on the vanes, which had been removed from Thrallyin’s hide.

  Lyokh listened to the creature’s breathing, and smelled the sulfur-like odor it emitted. And just like that, he was traveling back through time, his mind peeling back the layers of both space and time, taking him to the wyrm’s origins…

  “I saw your ancestors,” he whispered at the small ear cavity at the side of its head. He wanted to reach out and touch it, but he knew that hatchlings often reacted violently to touches belonging to anyone besides their Tamers. If he offended Thrallyin, no telling what might happen.

  I know what would happen, he thought. I’ve seen it.

  Indeed, he had seen what a wyrm could do to mortal flesh, not just in battle, but in his vision. His journey. Whatever you want to call it. The details were vague, but he recalled the many battles he saw the wyrms wage against one another. More vividly, he recollected the Fire Birds thrashing at one another in the sky, driven mad by a virus and by bloodlust. He knew what violence was encoded in Thrallyin’s DNA, he knew what fire was woven into that genetic fiber.

  The beast moved in its sleep, its plates undulating in patterns. He had never been so awed as right now, staring into sleeping yet wary eyes of a creature whose origin he had witnessed.

  “I’ve seen that look before,” a voice said behind him. “It’s the look of a man having a moment of introspect. These creatures often give people that feeling. One can’t help it. Their majesty is unequaled.”

  Lyokh turned to face him. “Artemis.”

  “You wanted to see me, doyen? If you wanted to clash swords, I could think of better places for it,” he laughed.

  Lyokh smiled, and shook his hand. Artemis gave him a quick, soldierly embrace, then clapped his shouler. “God, it’s good to see you. We heard strange things, that you vanished, as if teleported off someplace.”

  “It was…” Lyokh didn’t know how to explain it. “A trial of a different sort. But I’m better now, and I’ve come to talk about something. Artemis…I’d like to pick your brain a moment, if I can.”

  “I’m all yours, Sir Captain.”

  They started walking around the hangar, leaving Thrallyin behind and passing into the chamber where Rabastiik was kept. Coils were almost twice as large as hatchlings, and even asleep and coiled into a ball, Rabastiik looked like he would soon be ready to shed his skin and scales, hibernate for a year, and emerge as a horned serpens. The stumps where the horns would be were already pushing out of his skull.

  “How much do we know about wyrms?” asked Lyokh, ducking beneath a crane that moved along an overhead gantry. “How much do we really know?”

  Artemis’s eyes narrowed, and he scratched his blonde stubble. “Do you mean their origins? Their physiology? Their psychology?”

  “Let’s start with origins.”

  Artemis wiggled his head. “Well, the Isoshi are said to have found them first, and when they did, they began immediately to tame them. They studied their wyrmsong, discovered they were intelligent enough to recognize signing languages, and could follow directions if bidden. The less aggressive ones were bred out, leaving only the most docile ones.”

  “What was the name of their homeworld again?” asked Lyokh.

  “The Isoshi called it Ympherae, but we’ve never found it, and they’ve never shared that information with us,” Artemis said. “Some believe that the Isoshi have lost that information, too.”

  “Have we ever found them outside of Ympherae?”

  “We haven’t, no, but the Faedyans claim to have found clusters of wyrms on some other planet, far from their homeworld, some eight thousand years ago in the Perseus Arm, not too far from the Crab Nebula. But with the records lost it’s little more than legend.”

  “What do the Faedyans say about the wyrms they found?”

  Artemis sighed. “Not much, I’m afraid. I made this a central study of mine at Tamer School, actually, and never found much to work into any kind of meaningful thesis. Others have tried, too. People who were better students than I ever was, and found naught but rumors of deformed monsters, wyrms that were the subject of some cruel genetic downturn.”

  Lyokh looked over Rabastiik, its lidless, sleeping eyes following them. Again, the smell of its breath took him back. Lyokh went back to the beginning of the Planet of the Wyrms, carried on solar winds and clouds of sulfur…

  “As if someone had tried experimenting on them?”

  “Perhaps,” Artemis said.

  “If that were true, it would be evidence that someone found them long before the Isoshi. I mean, we know some of their species can naturally survive in vacuum, and some had natural solar cells, and solar wind vanes in their pores to help them move around in vacuum, and we breed those for our own use, but none of them have ever had the capability to cross stars.”

  Artemis nodded. “That is correct. If the story were true, it would mean someone else found them first, messed with their genetic coding, and dumped a whole lot of th
eir failed experiments on some world.”

  “Do the Faedyans claim to own any descendants of the wyrms they found?” Lyokh asked.

  “I don’t believe so. My understanding is that they let the poor creatures be.”

  “Wyrms are long-lived, though. They could still be alive. The original wyrms, I mean.”

  “Theoretically. If they had a food source that wasn’t just each other. They survive a long time off solar energy alone, and heat from volcanic vents, but they cannot endure forever without protein.” Artemis came to a halt, and looked at him. “Why are you asking all this, doyen? Did something happen in the Watchtower to make you suddenly so curious?”

  Lyokh hesitated. Wondered how much he ought to share. What he had experienced had been fantastical, an outré journey into depths never before plumbed (to his knowledge) by Man. He said, “I saw something, Artemis. What I saw, I can’t explain, but I feel like…I feel like an important part of galactic history was imprinted somehow on the s’Dar Watchtower, a frequency of some kind…and I tapped into it. I saw through a window…or stepped through a door, take your pick.”

  Artemis took a step closer to him. “Tell me, doyen, did it concern wyrms. I much desire to hear it, if it did.”

  Lyokh hesitated only a moment longer, then decided Artemis was probably better off not knowing too much. Lyokh was coming to believe this Crusade was not nearly as noble, or even as exploratory, as they’d been led to believe. Kalder wanted something, and he had manipulated events to get it. If Kalder had sent him into the Watchtower to “activate” something, then the fewer people knew, the fewer could get hurt by his machinations.

  “It’s nothing, Artemis. Thank you for your time. I just…I just needed to vent some things. I’ve got work to do, and I’m sure you do, as well. Unless you’re up for a round of sparring?”

  : SDFA Voice of Reason

  When she left the Navy, a lot of people in Moira’s life had tried to talk her out of it. Chief among them all six of her parents, who, along with having contributed portions of their mitochondrial DNA to have her conceived in Mama Lisa’s womb, had had some part in her upbringing. The last person to try and talk her out of leaving had been the officer signing her final discharge papers. You’ll regret this forever, the officer had said. There aren’t many places left to go.