by Chad Huskins
The thought rankles the Conductor. That the Everlasting Empire never knew defeat until very recently, until his era…
The orders are already leaving him, being dispensed to other nodes. Skirmishers are already taking off—they stayed prepped for such operations—and they are already beginning their initial scans. For the moment, the Conductor isn’t going anywhere, but these skirmishers are. So let’s leave the fleet’s highest power for the moment, and let’s see just what kind of job these skirmishers can do.
Sixteen skirmishers are sent out from each starship—four groups of four—each one of them about the size of old F-16s and a dozen times faster and more nimble. They fan out across the area, plunging deep into dark space, leaving Four Point behind. They move far away from the shelter of the fleet, deeper and deeper into vacuum, exploring the mundane remnants of two baseball-sized asteroids that collided ages ago, and then another asteroid pulverized almost to dust.
Deeper and deeper. Scans are running in all directions. One skirmisher has pulled far ahead of the others, scanning a nondescript patch of black space so far out from Four Point that neither it nor the fleet is even a speck of dust. In the corner of the Squadron Leader’s eye, a light blinks four times. He checks the spectral analysis of the smallest speck of ice left out here in the void.
The Squadron Leader runs several more scans just to be sure. This ice has the teensiest remnants of ionic striations at a microscopic level. He runs another check, and realizes this is the patch of space where Four Point crews said they detected the gamma burst flash and the carbon black particles.
Perhaps more ice is the trail we’re looking for, not more carbon black particles, the Squadron Leader considers, expanding his search. He sends the data back to his team, and together they start a slow scan of the area, keeping fifty miles apart at first, and filling the gap with seekers. It isn’t long before the Leader gets another register. “Control, this is Squadron Leader on Search Team Three. I believe we have something. It is a slim trail of ice with subtle ionic striations.”
“Is it possible to lock down a direction?” responds one Manager aboard the Supreme Commander’s flagship.
The Leader takes a few seconds to look over the data. “Negative, Control. The few ice particles we’re detecting are too sparse. They’ve drifted near other rock and dust particles. If this was a trail left by a ship, it’s far too scattered to lock down a path.”
“Can you at least get a reading on the age of the ice?”
“Negative. Samples are too miniscule to quantum-date.”
The reply comes down from the Supreme Conductor, through the Manager, and flows into the Leader. “Then it’s possible it was left by the ship of some ancient spacefaring civilization. Nevertheless, as per executive orders from High Command, we will treat this as conclusive evidence of the Phantom’s transit.”
On his display, the Squadron Leader sees his data absorbed and a final decision made by the Conductor. Calculations are made based on the current movements of the ice particles. Next, he sees various courses laid out for each squadron to follow, all of them leading outward from that zone of invisible ice. On holographic display, the Leader sees a path drawn for his own squadron that leads into nothing but darkness. There’s a single small reading of some gravitic distortion or other, but it’s so tiny and distant…
The Leader doesn’t expect to find the Phantom living there. There’s nothing that way but the edge of the galaxy, some sparse clouds of hydrogen, helium, and dust, maybe a pair of far-flung protoplanets, a gas giant with no useful resources, if these readings are right. Nothing to attract a rational, sentient being. There is nothing but coldness and death out there. Nowhere to take up permanent residence or to even hope to stage a fight.
Still, the Phantom is no rational being, is he? He is human, and so something so foolish as plunging farther into the Deep may seem sane. Such madness paid off once, didn’t it?
The Leader recalls the data from the Event Anomaly. The battle in the asteroid field seemed to some to indicate a flaw the Phantom had stumbled upon in Cereb thought processes. But the Supreme Conductor has developed new maneuvering protocols that will ensure that no Cereb pilot is caught so off-guard again.
“All squadrons! You have permission to conduct reconnaissance following projected lines. Each squadron will take along a Bleed Driver, should you require it.” That is only natural. Skirmishers can make quick, sub-light jumps with their onboard drives, but it just isn’t efficient to put Bleed-capable engines on every single skirmisher. A waste or resources, so sayeth the Calculators. So in order to open the Bleed, a squadron needs a ship known as a Bleed Driver, which moves ahead of the squadron and warps spacetime by one part in ten million, just enough to open up the quantum slipstream, then envelopes them in all in a bubble of real space to carry them through.
“Attention, all squadrons! Maintain your individual search lines, and make sure your teams report any anomalies along the way.”
The Leader sends a brief acknowledgement and wordlessly takes the lead of his squadron. He and his three cohorts move away from the others, plunging ahead for the darkest regions they’ve ever crossed into. It’s come to this. The search for the last human takes us to the edges of the galaxy.
We experience a moment of panic. It might take a little while for this Squadron Leader to put it together, and maybe he’ll even become as confused as we briefly were when he comes to Rook’s staggered trail, but that doesn’t weaken the fact that he is on the Sidewinder’s trail, whether he knows it or not. There is not one chance in hell that we can warn Rook—it’s the one power our incorporeal form forbids us to exercise—but we can rush far ahead of this squadron and check on Rook’s progress. With any luck, he and Bishop have finished their search of the Ianeth installation and are on their way out.
Racing past the squadron now, past the low-mass brown dwarf, around the nebula, past the gas giant, and then through the deepest and emptiest regions of space. Finally, we have arrived at the dark planet. Kali looms ahead, and we pierce through cloud, ash, thunder and lightning, and though it’s difficult to find the Sidewinder in all this darkness, we follow the two minds made for meddling just fine.
They’re still in the cave, and they haven’t even made it very far inside. This is…disconcerting.
The cave started out on a slight decline, but now has gained in steepness. Rook steps around a stalagmite, jutting out jaggedly from the floor. Numerous stalactites hang from the ceiling. Together, these teeth reinforce the illusion of some creature’s mouth. They also point to the fact that moisture was once running through the ground above. Some of the stalactites have even merged with stalagmites to form columns. “Cave formations like these take hundreds of years to grow,” Rook says. “How long were your people gone from here before they met their end?”
“Difficult to say,” Bishop replies. “I was hardly around to see the very end, was I?” Was it sarcasm? If so, was it coupled with genuine ire, or was it just Bishop trying again to meet Rook on a language he understood?
Sarcasm or no, Rook realizes suddenly that while he and his partner both share the unique perspective of lone survivors, only Bishop knows what it’s like to be kept a prisoner for…how long was it exactly? “How long were you kept prisoner?”
“I have no real way of knowing, though I estimate a thousand years or longer.”
As Rook proceeds, down and down, deeper and deeper, he considers that. And for the first time, it occurs to him to ask, “Were you awake?”
“Some of the time,” says Bishop simply.
“Was it…?”
“Horrible? Affirmative, friend.”
Rook pulls up short. He looks at the alien, and has a moment of sympathy. “I’m sorry. I, uh, I didn’t know that.”
“Of course you didn’t. You never asked.”
Was that aggravated shortness or just a statement of fact? For Rook, it’s hard to tell. For us, we know that it’s a bit of both. “Well, I’m sorry,”
he says, remaining diplomatic just in case. The safest way to play it. “I can’t imagine what it was like. Staring out at your captors, unable to move while they examined you. It must’ve taken a lot of discipline to keep your sanity.”
“That wasn’t what threatened my sanity,” Bishop says, turning away.
“What was?”
Bishop is walking off.
Rook almost pursues the question, but lets it go for the moment. The alien doesn’t seem eager to recount the story, so Rook just follows him. The ground and walls tremble, and dust falls from the cave ceiling. Down and down they go, deeper and deeper.
Eventually, they get so deep that even night-vision starts to fail—it requires ambient light to amplify, and there is still some in the cave, it’s starting to get much dimmer. Rook switches off his visor’s NV setting and now turns on both his helmet-mounted light and the light at the end of his Exciter. Now he can see the cave in color, and it’s actually quite wondrous! Thin lines of rusty-red soil go along the cave walls like the trail of a whimsical finger-painter, and there are dark greens and deep purples, and bursts of white here and there.
A chime goes off. Rook checks the lower-right corner of his HUD. The Sidewinder has completed a more thorough sonar scan of the planet’s surface. The ship’s fabricator can drill a hundred feet into an asteroid’s surface to mine for resources, but here its drill allows for the implanting of one of Bishop’s specially-enhanced drones. Now they send back detailed readings of Kali’s crust, which consists mostly of volcanic basalt. There’s a mantle about 1,100 miles thick, and scans say it’s probably about the consistency of a rocky paste, made up of silicon, oxygen, magnesium and iron. However, there are key nutrients here, such as potassium, sodium, magnesium and chloride. There is also—
What the hell is this?
One reading stands out, leaves him utterly stymied, and then makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He looks at Bishop, who has continued on down into the cave. Rook says, “Somethin’ you wanna tell me?”
The Ianeth stops, turns, and looks at him. “What do you mean?”
Rook walks over to the nearly tall creature and looks up at its deep black eyes. “Since our little, uh, minor hiccup on the landing, I decided to run a more thorough check of the surface, and also what’s beneath the surface. Know what your special little drones found?” The alien just stares at him. “There are astonishingly few apertures near the crust. The crust on this planet is almost one piece.”
“And so.”
Rook sneers and shakes his head. “You’re really going to make me say it.”
“I am.”
The cave trembles all around them.
“It doesn’t take a second-year geology student to know that without tectonic plates riding a planet’s mantle, there is no way a planet’s terrain can be constantly reshaped like this one has.” He stares daggers up at Bishop. “And if that’s the case, the planet couldn’t have this kind of volcanic activity, but this place is a freaking oven, a lava pit! The crust here is one piece, yet the scans do indicate there is movement.”
“So, your question?”
“My question is, you son of a bitch,” he says, pointing down at his feet. “What the hell is making all that racket?” Just then, the cave trembles harder than before, a four-pointer to be sure. It’s as if the planet has suddenly become aware that it’s being talked about, and wants to have a say in this conversation.
Bishop stares at him a moment, and then, finally, he says, “Very good, friend. Very good. You didn’t rely on my word alone, and you didn’t just double-check my work, you went deeper. That is a worthy step.”
Rook isn’t feeling the compliment. “Just tell me what the hell is going on beneath our feet.”
“Troglobites.”
Rook blanches, then searches his memory. “Troglo…bites? What the hell are you talking about? You mean subterranean life?”
“Affirmative.”
He tries to wrap his mind around that, then shakes his head. “No, no, no…wait, no, you’re pulling my leg again—”
“I’m not, but I fully encourage you to doubt the veracity of everything I have said, and I did tell you before we made our approach to Kali that there is life beneath the—”
“Troglobites are tiny creatures, insects or small animals, bats and small fish, but even they can’t survive without lots of energy that—”
“They can survive if there are enough thermal vents,” Bishop interrupts. “Extremophiles on your world survived in oceans, near heat vents where no sunlight reaches. There is a complex troglofauna ecosystem going on below us.”
“There’s life here,” Rook clarifies. “Life that large.”
“Yes. Non-intelligent life, but life.”
That causes him to take a step back. Then, reeling from the shock of that, Rook wraps his mind around something else. “But how do troglofaunal life-forms cause temblors?”
“It’s a very big ecosystem,” Bishop says. “And the largest at the top of the food chain is the…well, my species speaks mostly in infrasound, so the word would be mostly meaningless to you. So let us call it the Colossus.”
Rook blinks. “Well, now, that certainly sounds ominous. What is it?”
“I don’t know. None of us ever knew.”
“Then how do you know it’s even there?”
The ground shakes as Bishop speaks. “The same way you did, we scanned for tectonic movement, so as to better predict earthquakes. What we found was a different kind of movement. A few expeditions yielded discoveries of biological life, small at first, but larger the deeper one goes.”
“Larger the deeper one goes?” That is odd, because it was universally the reverse back on Earth.
“The life on this planet isn’t and has never been fueled by photosynthesis—it has always been thermosynthesis. The core has supplied all the heat energy necessary for subterranean plants and animals. Though, as you stated, there isn’t much movement between Kali’s mantle and plates. Activity on this planet is winding down, and therefore so is life—maybe it has another forty or fifty thousand years, maybe a hundred—but the core is still hot enough to keep the ecosystem going for now.”
The idea of some living thing that huge…it’s difficult to grasp, hardly assimilable. Rook shakes his head in disbelief. “This is another one o’ your games.”
“It’s not, but I’m glad that you’re—”
“Has to be! What kind o’ creature makes that kind o’ noise?” The world shakes again, not as hard as before, but enough to be heard.
“Our theory was that the Colossus has been providing the friction necessary to fuel the engine usually conducted by plate tectonics—”
“A creature like that would have to be massive! Like, the size of a continent!”
“It may be that there are several Colossi, a community of twenty or more—”
“I don’t care if there are a hundred! That’s far too big for any ecosystem to sustain! What the hell would it feed on?”
“Perhaps nothing,” says Bishop. “That is, if Kali’s core is feeding it. Of course, that brings up a whole other theory.”
“Which is?” Rook looks at the alien, who remains stoic. He points at Bishop. “Don’t you hold out on me now. I need to know everything. C’mon, what is it?”
The Ianeth hesitates a moment longer, then finally gives a human shrug. “It’s just a theory. Some held your view that no creature could’ve naturally evolved under such confined conditions—gravity pulls inwards, restrains expansion and growth, and with a permanent ceiling over a species’ head, it cannot grow terribly large. So the idea was that this ecosystem was transplanted here.”
Rook blanches. “What, like somebody brought it here? An entire troglofaunal ecosystem? How could they do that? Why would they do that?”
“Let me put it this way. My people came here to hide and plan our next attacks, we chose this place because it is difficult to detect, due to the intrinsically weak thermal mi
crowave radiation emissions that emanate from it. Some of us felt that maybe whoever brought the Colossus and its ecosystem here had the same idea we had, only instead of looking to hide and stage attacks from here, they sought to hide some of their legacy, a part of their home world. And maybe, over time, they wished for that life to find its way back to the surface again. Much of the life here has gotten closer to the surface over the centuries.”
“Wait, hold up, you’re telling me this planet might be an egg waiting to hatch?”
“It’s just a theory,” Bishop repeats. Then he assumes the lead again and uses the barrel of his Quickener to point the way. “Come on. We still have a ways to go.”
Rook watches the alien walk away, then looks down at his feet as the ground quakes and a few pebbles skitter off the surface. He looks behind him, above him, and all around him. This world just took on a whole new flavor.
Down and down, deeper and deeper. They pass through a pile of stones, the remains of a cracked pillar, where a stalactite and stalagmite once merged into an immense column, and then came shattering to pieces, likely the result of the ceaseless temblors. The Colossus, you mean, Rook tells himself, now evaluating each tremor with new wonder and uncertainty. If even half of what Bishop said is true, then it’s just as Rook surmised before, and the universe really is as hostile an environment as one could conceive.
It also leaves the questions begging, who, if anyone, placed such life here? Where had they gone? And what happened to them once they left?
Down and down, deeper and deeper.
They squeeze through a narrow corridor, and once on the other side they come to the first real sign that this corridor was all designed by intelligent beings. The walls are lined by some sort of metal, all covered in dust and some of it is partially buried behind rock, but it is all still in great condition. Rook taps a few keys on his OCC, runs a scan. The alloy is a little like compristeel, but bears more metallic and chemical resemblance to Bishop’s organic armor—which Rook has taken to referring to as “organisteel.”
