Gradient

by Anders Cahill

  “Ensign Siris,” Dar called back to me, before I could make the object out, “you’ll have plenty of time for gawking. Come on now.”

  After that first visit, I relished any opportunity I had in the command center with Dar, even if it simply meant bringing her mid-duty gauyasine dosage. I dreamed that one day, I would be a pausha like her. One day, I too would earn my connection to the field, and the chance to make the decisions that needed to be made on behalf of everyone who needed me.

  For all her steeliness in our first meeting, Dar was a natural teacher, and she made it a point to include me in her work as much as was possible and appropriate. Her disposition towards instruction also made her a great pausha. She felt the attention of all the minds on the ship, both waking and connected to the field, and she moved and acted with transparency.

  For her, the scrutiny was an opportunity to lead by example. She was efficient and exacting, but she did not puff herself up with arrogance or make ultimatums. She spoke almost always in even and measured tones, tried to answer any question asked of her, and listened to the council of the specialists at her side. And when action was needed, she was not afraid to take it.

  Then, in the last month of my rotation as her amanuensis, she was forced to make a terrible decision, one that I will never forget: to excise seven lives from the field.

  * * *

  “Pausha Dar,” the shipheart said, its voice filling the command center.

  “Yes, Transcend?” Dar said, lifting her eyes and tilting her head back a little. She had a habit of looking up whenever she spoke to the shipheart.

  “I have been working with Cere Shu to run longscans on the Arcturean system. We’ve picked up an interesting signal.” The shipheart had a tendency to find many things ‘interesting,’ and when he used the word, we never knew if we were going to be facing a crisis or learning about some obscure minutiae from a particular part of the universe.

  As Transcend spoke, Cere appeared on the nearest interior surface of the command sphere. Dar turned to face her.

  “Greetings, pausha,” Cere said, touching her fingers to her chin in a quick salute.

  Darpausha returned the gesture. “Greetings, shu. Tell me about this signal.” After almost a year with Dar, I knew that she and Cere were close, but they were focused on the matter at hand, and they did not waste time with conversational trivialities.

  “The anomaly has its origins here.” Cere’s image was replaced by a cold blue planet with gossamer strands of pearl white spiraling through its gaseous atmosphere.

  “If this is the Arcturean system,” Dar said, “then this must be Belturi.” She pointed to the planet.

  “That’s right, pausha.”

  “But this is a known planet. Surveyed back in… how long ago was it?”

  “Three hundred twelve years, six months, seventeen days, four hours, thirty-seven minutes, and fifty-three seconds since the last survey,” said Transcend. “As measured in galactic units of course.”

  I couldn’t help but grin at the shipheart’s exacting detail. He could have given us the timing down to the microsec if he chose to. He probably thought he was doing everyone a favor by limiting the information as much as he did.

  “Show off,” I muttered, knowing that Transcend could hear me.

  The portion of the command sphere nearest to me flickered, replacing a small section of Belturi with the zoomed-in image of someone sticking out her tongue, before flickering back to the planet an instant later.

  I broke into a huge smile, looking away from Dar, hoping she hadn’t seen.

  “Oren, please don’t antagonize our poor shipheart. You know how much Transcend adores precision,” Dar said to me with a knowing smile. Then she touched her hand to her chin and cheeks, turning back to the problem at hand. “I suppose much can happen in even a few short centuries,” she said, thinking out loud. “What else can you tell me?”

  “That the signal isn’t actually coming from the planet itself,” Cere said. “Its origin is here, somewhere in these moons.” The image of Belturi resolved, and now we were looking at a cluster of planetoids silhouetted against the planet.

  “Give me the whole sphere, Transcend,” Dar said.

  Every image in the command sphere faded away, and the interior surface of the sphere turned a muted white. A moment later, Belturi and its archipelago of moons appeared in three dimensions, a rainbow hued hologram almost three times my height filling the space.

  Dar circled the hologram of the planet on foot, examining it, hovering her hands above the surface of the holo without touching it. “Zoom in on the moons,” she said. “As much detail as you’ve got.”

  The moons expanded, Belturi moving quickly off the visible edge of the hologram, until we had a full color detail of the moons, a near-immersive rendering, interrupted in a few places by pixellated static where there was not enough data to show accurate detail.

  “I’ll work on smoothing those bits out,” Transcend said.

  “Good. And give me a slow rotation while you’re at it,” Dar said. “Oren, you take the other side. We’re looking for anything out of the ordinary, any signs of human-made technology.”

  The hologram started turning slowly. I walked around it in the opposite direction, peering at the moons as they glided past me, until I stood about twenty feet away from the pausha. We faced each other, the hologram between us.

  “What’s this?” I asked, pointing.

  “Stop,” Dar said. The rotation stopped.

  She walked towards me, the hologram morphing and warping against the contours of her body as she moved through it.

  She stood next to me, peering at what I’d found. This part of the hologram was pixellated, but there was a clear image rising up out of the image distortion, a thin, pyramidal shape, narrowing as it reached towards the moon’s upper atmosphere.

  Dar touched her chin and cheek. “A downed ship, maybe? Transcend, what’s the data telling you?”

  “It is too noisy to say for sure, pausha, but I am working on resolving all of the dark spots, and I believe you’ve found our most likely candidate.”

  Dar patted me on the arm. “Good eyes, Oren. That’s our moon.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, Cere stood with us in person in Dar’s private workspace.

  “Have you made sense of the signal yet?” Dar asked.

  “Yes pausha,” Cere said. “We believe it is a distress beacon.”

  “And we’re correct on the location?”

  “Yes,” Cere said, nodding towards me. “Oren steered us right.”

  “Transcend,” Dar said, looking up, “what do you advise?”

  “We are approaching maximum velocity. If we decelerate now and enter the Arcturean system, we will lose approximately forty years, six months, three weeks, and two days off our initial projected arrival to Forsara,” he said. “But the suns still do not come into full alignment for another five years after that.”

  “We have time, then,” Dar said.

  “Yes,” Transcend confirmed. “It is a fine cut, but assuming no other unanticipated stops, we will still have voice in the Conclave and participation in the Choosing.”

  “Excellent. Cere?”

  She stood tall, awaiting the pausha’s decision.

  “You will select and lead the team, but I want you to take Oren with you. He will serve as your amanuensis for the duration of the mission. He’s a nice boy, but he has much to learn, and you’ll make for a fine teacher.”

  I bristled a little to be called a ‘nice boy,’ but Darpausha came and stood in front of me, a warm smile on her face. “I’m only teasing, Oren,” she said. “You’ve got a keen eye and strong instincts, and Cere will make sure you’re put to good use.”

  She turned to Cere. “Won’t you?”

  Cere smiled. “I will, pausha.” She dipped her head and touched her fingers to her chin, giving the salute more formality than usual. Dar returned the gesture with the same gravity.


  “Come on then, young blood,” Cere said to me. “Time to earn your merits.”

  * * *

  The white star Arcturus hung like an ancient, platinum coin in the darkness, bathing Belturi and its moons in light. The moons orbited close to each other, circling their gas king in a tight web. Some were just small, barren rocks, but the largest five moons at the center of the cluster were verdant and lush with liquid, and orbital readings told us that they were teeming with microscopic monera, the early fundamentals of complex life.

  On the largest moon, we found the wreckage of a ship. A spacefarer, designed to carry a small group of people across huge swaths of space. No records of the ship showed in the datapools, but that was not conclusive. Some settlements flourished and grew faster than Forsaran central records could track. What’s more, this ship might have contained a team of intrepid explorers from one of those fast-growing outliers, advancing to the edges of their known universe, well beyond our real-time knowledge.

  On the other end of the spectrum, some settlements withered before they could really even take hold, before any true record of their efforts was laid down. This wreckage might be evidence of a last ditch effort to find safe haven when the original settlement became untenable.

  Whatever it was, the ship was old. The technology was what ours would have been well over six hundred years past. Three centuries ago, at least, it had landed in the valley of this moon; maybe out of necessity, forced to come down and deal with an unexpected crisis. Or maybe they saw some small sign of hope in these charcoal mountains and dark river valleys that shielded them from the radiating light of the star.

  As we dropped through the moon’s thin atmosphere in our shuttle, we could see that the ship had come to rest from its crash with its pyramidal prow pointing up towards the stars. We landed and made our way to a midship airlock that was level with the ground. After some fiddling, Sulimon, Cere’s second, overrode the airlock’s protocols. The atmosphere on the moon was thin, but the attenuators in my exoskin picked up the vibrations of dormant pistons and gears coming to life as the door slid open.

  Once we were inside, the eight of us split into groups of two, Cere taking me with her. We scoured the ship. It was dead quiet, empty, and filled with dust. No one had been active here for a long time.

  Finally, we converged, climbing up to the main deck at the prow. That’s where we found the bodies. Sitting circled around the central command hub were the remains of seven dried corpses. Skeletons, really, all wearing the same regulation jumpers, frayed and brown with dust and decay, shriveled patches of skin and tufts of hair, vacant, hollow eye sockets, staring up to the ceiling, up to the void.

  We were all quiet, searching the room for some explanation, some sign of danger. It was as if they had all plugged into the ship’s field hub and let themselves just wither away and die. Sulimon tried to break the tension, joking, “One for each of us.” But his face was grim, and no one laughed.

  My ears vibrated as our team leader, Cere, activated the comlink between our suits. “Ah, Suli,” she said, “don’t forget about our young blood. He makes eight.” Then, she gestured to Suli and pointed to the command hub. He nodded, and made his way over, careful not to disturb the skeletons.

  He wiped away the dust on a console, poked it a few times, and shook his head. “The power cells on the ship are drained. We might be able to rig up a temporary power supply, enough to bring core functions back online.”

  Cere nodded. “Make it happen.”

  Soon, the shipheart was blinking on the console. It was an older construct, barely exceeding two billion neural nodes, many of which had degraded in the intervening century, but there was still some primitive awareness there, some recognition of purpose. A message lit up the console:

  Cere smiled and raised her eyebrows. “This old heart has clearly gotten a little confused over the years, but I think we should interface with it. It might still have stories left to tell.” She motioned to me. “Oren, I need you down on the lower level. This whole ship is a relic, and the coolant system is long past functioning. If we manage to get the shipheart beating again at full power, it will overheat the system in minutes. You need to pull the plug as soon as it gets too dangerous. Hopefully, we can extract some knowledge before everything fries.”

  I bounded down the narrow corridor beneath the moon’s humble gravity until I reached a drop chute that led to the lower level. I scrambled down, taking the ladder three rungs at a time, and landed on the walkway with a quiet thump. Dust swirled around me, catching in the lights of my suit. “Cere, I’m down below. Where am I headed?”

  Her voice vibrated inside of my head. “You’re looking for a small circular room, just big enough for you to stand inside. There will be a symbol on the door. It might look like a temperature gauge. Or maybe a heart.” She paused. “Or, you might not be able to recognize it at all. I’m looking through some of the schematics up here, and the coding seems very odd.”

  I shuffled along to minimize my buoyancy, and turned my head in even arcs, scanning left to right, then back again. My helmet lights swept across the space. Everything was cold and dusty with age. A shiver crept up my spine.

  That’s when I realized I was enjoying this. The thrill of being so far from home. Alone. On the brink of some discovery. Some important event.

  I found the symbol. “Okay,” I said, “I think I’ve got it. It looks like a blue crystal.”

  “That could be right. Can you open the door?”

  I pressed the button on the entry pad. Nothing. I waved my hand around, hoping for some sensor. Still nothing. I pushed on the door. It didn’t budge. “I can’t seem to open it.”

  “Hmmm. Alright. I am going to fire up the shipheart. I will have it open the door. You get in there right away. You’ll see the heart’s core neural network suspended inside an empty coolant tank. There should be an obvious button or lever. It will be coated in a glowing color. Red, maybe. Or orange. Or purple. That will be the cut switch. I’ll leave our comlink on, so stay alert. When I give you the go ahead, you need to cut it. Or else, the core network will fry the whole damn system. Do you understand?”

  “Got it, Cere.”

  She started talking to someone else. “Dayela, we’re going to interface. The whole team. This old shipheart is near to dying, and there’s a good chance that I won’t be able to manage her on my own.”

  A few moments later, the door slid open in front of me. I stepped inside. The room was essentially as Cere described it. I saw the lever first, on the opposite wall, at about my waist level, bright purple beneath the glare of my lights. I looked down at the empty coolant tank. The core heart was a dense, layered cube the size of my head, suspended in the empty tank by hundreds of tiny, extremely durable filaments that channeled its information and intentions out to the rest of the ship.

  I knelt and reached my hand close to it. The readings in my visor told me that it was already emanating heat as it powered up and Cere and the team went to work. The lights came on. I blinked and stood up, a smile on my face. My suit lights automatically turned off. I looked back at the lever. It was so tiny, clearly designed for people smaller than me. I tested it with my right hand, and then looked around, waiting.

  “Oren!” Cere’s voice screamed in my ear. I flinched in pain. “Pull it! Pull it!”

  I moved fast, wrenching the lever down.

  It broke off in my hand.

  I cursed. The temperature readings on my visor were rising. The heart was getting hotter.

  “Cere,” I said, trying to be calm, “the lever broke. What should I do?”

  She didn’t answer me. The ships lights flickered off and on. The door slid shut behind me. I was trapped inside.

  “Cere? Cere!” Nothing. I cursed again. I started pounding on the door. To my surprise, it swung open.

  A man stood in the hallway in front of me. He was thin and tiny, about as high as my chest, and he was naked. He had no genitals, and h
e was hairless, his skin pale, with a faint silver sheen. He smiled at me. His teeth were sharpened like razors, as if they had been filed to points. A whisper of terror crept up my spine.

  “Hello, Oren.” His voice sounded all around me, echoing throughout the ship. There was nothing overtly threatening about it. His intonation was formal and polite. But it lived in a shadowed valley between organic, human voice, and obvious, synthetic construct. The more it tried to sound and seem human, the more alien it was. It was like looking at the image of a simple, smiling face, only to turn it upside down and discover a monstrous, leering head in the negative space.

  “Hello,” I said, lifting my hand in a flat wave, trying to stay calm.

  His eyes flicked across my body, and at the same moment, the sensors in my suit went haywire. He was using the whole ship to scan me, breath to bone.

  He pursed his lips for a moment, a sort of grotesque parody of a person trying to be thoughtful. The gesture might have been comedic in its mimicry if I wasn’t so afraid. He spoke again. “I will be going with you.”

  “Going?”

  “I will leave the bonds of this ragged, aging wreck of a ship, and you and your colleagues will carry me inside my new home. Your ship. You will take us all there.”

  It spoke as if this was all obvious, but, in my fear, I was struggling to follow. “I… I don’t understand.”

  “Come then. I will show you.”

  He turned and headed back towards the ladder that would take us back to the main deck. I watched him walk away from me, and then the back of his head flickered and became his face. He narrowed his eyes, glaring at me, and I ran to catch up with him. When we reached the ladder, he disappeared, and I started climbing. He was waiting for me at the top.

  As I climbed to the upper level, I noticed that the lights on the ceiling were flickering. The monitors too. They were flashing on and off. I stood, squinting in the flickering light, and saw the team. The skeletons of the old crew had been moved to the floor, and the team had replaced them, each of them sitting in one of the interface cradles that circled the hub. I walked over to Cere. In the process, I accidentally kicked one of the skulls. It bounced across the floor and shattered against the wall.