Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three)

by Worth, Dan

  ‘Is that how AIs say “We’re making it up as we go along”?’ muttered Rekkid, and if Eonara heard him, she gave no response. The drone clattered along without saying another word.

  Eventually, they arrived at a large circular door which irised open smoothly at Eonara’s command and allowed them to pass. Inside, they found themselves in a large chamber, dimly lit by wall sconces. As the lights started to come up, they gave a start, for the room was filled with ranks of humanoid figures, arranged in individual glass cases. The three archaeologists were looking at a veritable museum of robotics.

  At the front of the room were primitive looking things that would have been ancient even at the height of the Progenitor Empire: crude things of wheels, pistons and hydraulics, bulky sensors and articulated arms that mounted tools or weapons. They were simple, unthinking machines, designed for specific tasks. As the ranks progressed towards the rear of the chamber, the mechanoids became ever more advanced. These were sleeker, more graceful designs that more closely resembled stylised versions of the Progenitors themselves but which were still relatively primitive compared to the being that sat on the throne which topped the dais at the far end of the room.

  The ranks of mechanoids had been arranged with an aisle down the middle. Walking cautiously through the ranks of the silent army that had stood as if on parade for four thousand millennia, the archaeologists made their way towards the seated figure. It too was a stylised figure of a Progenitor of indeterminate sex, but one that was rendered from black crystal and liquid metal. A tapered head resembling the bows of the Shaper starships rendered in miniature sat atop a body that gleamed like onyx chased with silver in the light. As they moved closer still and stood before the silent figure, patterns could be seen deep within the surface of that dark crystalline body, myriad traces of the Progenitor script that overlaid one another.

  ‘One of the first,’ said Eonara. ‘This is what the Shapers looked like when they were created. Idealised versions of ourselves, rendered in all their cybernetic glory. The entire body is capable of processing data within its crystalline structure, just like the cells of a living body, and like living creatures, they were capable of replicating themselves. It was the finest creation that our technology had yet produced - an artificial, independent form of life. This one was never activated, never had a mind of its own. It is a shell, a museum piece, little more. Its construction material is a precursor of that used today by the Shapers to construct their warships, though they have refined its properties and melded it with the inter-dimensional technologies that power their ships.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Katherine. ‘A funny thing to say, perhaps, but it is.’

  ‘Beautiful, but flawed,’ said Eonara. ‘Terribly, terribly flawed. We were so proud of our children at first, not knowing what they would become, not realising that we had made them perfect and logical, but without compassion or mercy and that they had come to the cold and calculated conclusion that we were inferior and were to be eliminated or enslaved to their will.’

  ‘Eonara, you said that this facility, the Life Forge, was also the place where the program to seed worlds throughout the galaxy was undertaken,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Eonara replied.

  ‘We have a right to know which worlds,’ said Katherine.

  ‘I would strongly advise you against acquiring such knowledge,’ said Eonara. ‘It can only do harm. Remember what happened to the Akkal.’

  ‘We have a right to know,’ Katherine repeated. ‘What we do with that knowledge is our choice.’

  Eonara appeared to make sigh wearily and then continued. ‘Very well. The information is held in a system linked to a monitoring array built into the fabric of the Sphere that encases this system. Access to the system controls can be gained from a control room not far from here. Follow the drone, it will lead you there but I will assist you no further. I cannot be held responsible for the consequences.’

  They followed the drone deeper into the mountain, past the entrances to silent rooms and gleaming, abandoned laboratories stacked high with mysterious equipment. Eonara and Aaokon had relinquished control of the device, allowing it to act independently and obey the commands of the three archaeologists. Eventually, the drone brought them to a circular set of doors that slid aside at its command. The chamber beyond was large and circular. Concentric rows of consoles radiated out from a raised central dais of a smooth, black material. Lights winked around its base. The drone approached the dais and stood before it, arms and sensors waving for a moment as the others stepped warily towards it.

  Katherine thought she heard a voice then – it was almost imperceptible.

  ‘Did you hear something?’ she said, turning to Rekkid and Steelscale.

  ‘No, why?’ Steelscale replied, looking at her quizzically.

  ‘For a minute I thought I... never mind...’ she replied and shook her head.

  The drone convulsed and made a strangely animal like set of noises, and the dais came alive. A slowly rotating map of the galaxy appeared in the air above the dais, huge and shining, each individual star system picked out in glowing holographic clarity like a vast swirl of diamonds cast onto a velvet backdrop. A web of glowing lines denoted the vast gate network that the Progenitors had thrown across the galaxy. Its beauty was breathtaking. The drone manipulated the view, diving into that vast island of stars until they rushed by on all sides in their millions until one system in particular grew large in the centre of the projection. The vast shell of the Dyson Sphere encasing the system was clearly visible as were the planets orbiting within it, and the conjunction of gate network routes that converged upon it. It was showing them the Progenitor home system where they now stood. The drone spoke in Arkari.

  ‘The drone says that it has complete access to the system,’ said Rekkid. ‘It has used what we know of Progenitor technology to do so and reports that this facility runs on a system compatible with others that we have encountered. It awaits our command.’

  ‘Eonara said that this system is linked to some sort of monitoring array,’ said Katherine. ‘The Progenitors must have left it to watch over the worlds that they had seeded. Rekkid, order the drone to pull the view back again and highlight those worlds across the galaxy that the Progenitors had ordered the system to keep an eye on.’

  The drone did as it was ordered. The view zoomed out again to encompass the entire galaxy and then glowing red dots began to appear highlighting systems across its disc that the Progenitors had seeded with their nano-machines in an effort to subvert the evolution of life on suitable planets. A number of systems across the Western Spiral Arm were highlighted.

  ‘Ask it to zoom in on the Western Arm,’ said Katherine, with a lump in her throat. Soon the projection was filled with an arc of brightly glowing stars. A handful of systems in the centre of the image were picked out in red.

  ‘Ask the drone if it can match the co-ordinates of the star systems shown in the map to those in its own data stores and zoom in on that cluster of highlighted systems,’ said Katherine.

  The view focused on those glowing red points and expanded the view, appending labels in Arkari script to each star. Katherine recognised two of them immediately. The Arkari characters for both worlds were well known to her: Earth and Keros.

  They stood in stunned silence for a moment.

  ‘We suspected, did we not?’ said Steelscale, eventually. ‘The similarities that we had noted between the Progenitors and your cultures. I did not see my own home-world picked out on that map.’

  ‘No,’ said Rekkid. ‘Hence why the AIs of the Defence Collective were happy to admit us, but objected to you entering the Sphere. When they analysed myself, Katherine and the rest of the crew of the Shining Glory, they saw us as Progenitors, but not you.’

  ‘Eonara warned us,’ said Katherine, her voice quavering. ‘She warned us not to come here. So it’s true then. The Progenitors’ name is literally true, they created both our races and perhaps hundreds m
ore across the galaxy. Everything we thought we knew about our own species is a lie.’

  ‘The bit I really dislike, is that the religions of both our cultures and dozens more turn out to be true, in a manner of speaking’ said Rekkid, slowly. ‘We really were created by advanced beings. Just not in the way that they envisaged. No wonder the Akkal went crazy.’

  ‘The Progenitors may have seeded your worlds, but do we know whether their efforts were successful and responsible for your species’ evolution?’ said Steelscale. ‘Parallel evolution is not unknown in nature. It could still be a coincidence.’

  ‘You’re just trying to cheer us up,’ said Rekkid. ‘Very well, I’ll ask the drone to display what information the system holds on our worlds.’

  The view rushed in once more towards the Solar System, zooming in to a pale blue point of light that eventually resolved itself into the blue-green mottled orb of the earth. Polar caps and cloud tops gleamed whitely in the sunlight.

  ‘The continents look wrong,’ said Katherine. ‘See: North America and Europe are still joined together. India is depicted as an island far to the south of its present position.’

  The drone spoke.

  ‘The drone reports that according to its records, this depiction of the Earth is almost seventy million years out of date,’ said Rekkid. As he spoke, reams of Progenitor script and images began to appear, overlaying the slowly rotating Earth. There were images of monsters, of things with fangs and scales, of lumbering behemoths with long necks and tiny brains and sea-dwelling things with long, snapping jaws and rows of razor sharp teeth. Eventually the drone settled on one image. It was of a bipedal being, clad in the pelts of larger animals and holding a crudely made spear. Large, intelligent eyes provided binocular vision to a developed brain atop a body equipped with nimble hands. It wasn’t human. Its skin was scaly and mottled, its head ridged and plated and elongated, and its jaws lined with sharp teeth.

  ‘What on earth?’ said Katherine. ‘This can’t be right. As far as I know, there’s nothing in the fossil record to indicate anything like this.’

  ‘According to the accompanying script, these beings evolved from the more intelligent meat eating saurians around this time. They occupied a territory on the southern plains of what is now North America,’ said Rekkid.

  ‘They would have been obliterated by the asteroid that impacted in the Yucatan sixty five million years ago,’ said Katherine. ‘I imagine that the chances of anything surviving in the fossil record, given the likely delicate nature of their skeletons would be very slim indeed.’

  ‘So were these the beings created by the Progenitors?’ said Steelscale.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Rekkid. ‘The text even refers to them as “our progeny.”’

  ‘But what about humans? Did intelligent, bipedal beings emerge again purely due to natural evolution or because the Progenitors intended it to happen? What about the other species of hominids that emerged on Earth and died out?’ said Katherine.

  Rekkid spoke to the drone and then replied: ‘Impossible to say from this as there’s no records recent enough.’

  ‘What about Keros, what does it say about the Arkari?’ said Steelscale.

  The view switched to the Arkari home-world, and told a similar story. Again, the data on it was hopelessly out of date, depicting a world lacking intelligent life and dominated by huge, airborne predators.

  ‘Something must have happened to the array to stop it from working,’ said Rekkid. ‘Hardly surprising, given its extreme age.’

  ‘And yet other systems in this base seem to still be operational,’ said Katherine. ‘I wonder what happened?’

  ‘Bad luck or faulty components, I expect,’ Rekkid replied. ‘In any case, I’ll ask the drone to download a copy of all of this data. What we choose to do with it can wait, for now, though it is inconclusive.’

  ‘It certainly suggests the possibility that the Progenitors created our races,’ said Katherine.

  ‘And the Esacir, and Hyrdians, and the Nahabe,’ said Rekkid. ‘Look at the map again. Look at those systems highlighted.’

  The drone pulled the view back at his command until the totality of what constituted explored space for humans and Arkari filled the view, the red points of seeded worlds glowing like bright rubies.

  ‘Of course, this data also contains a complete copy of the locations of all the nodes of the Progenitor gate network still in operation up to the date of the map,’ said Rekkid. ‘Even if we keep the other findings to ourselves, this other information could be of incalculable value in allowing us to return home. It already shows where some links have been destroyed, I notice. According to this, there’s a portal about a hundred light years south of the Hadar system.’

  ‘Well that’s good news at least,’ said Katherine. ‘After all, at some point we need to get out of this place and go back home.’

  She heard the voice again, a subtle whisper that sounded like it was coming from the corners of the room. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. It was like the whisperings of a ghost.

  ‘There it is again,’ she said. ‘A voice. I heard it when we walked in here and I’m sure I just heard it once more. You don’t hear it?’

  Rekkid shook his head. Steelscale said nothing. The voice had sounded familiar. She recalled a black and blasted landscape under a sky lit with the fires of annihilation. It had been in a dream that she had had. That ship... Rhyolite...

  The starmap flickered. Lines of distortion caused the thousands of suns to ripple as though they were reflected in water.

  ‘Look at the map!’ said Katherine.

  They saw that the stars were moving. They were moving apart and re-arranging themselves until black gulfs of space began to form like tears in a sheet of fabric. Those tears formed into a face, with dark lightless eyes that floated above a dark abyss of a mouth.

  ‘No...’ said Katherine. ‘Oh no... it’s one of them! It’s a Shaper!’

  The horrid sounds of mocking laughter began to echo around the room and then, suddenly, the lights went out.

  Chapter 46

  ‘Have a look at this,’ said Steven, handing the datapad to Isaacs in the back seat of the truck. ‘Admiral Morgan made a speech just a few minutes ago. We’re going to need to move fast.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Isaacs.

  ‘See for yourself,’ said Steven as Isaacs pressed play on the news item

  Admiral Morgan stood at a lectern in full dress uniform, the emblem of the Freedom Alliance filling the wall behind him. Another figure stood to one side just in shot, also in uniform, hands clasped behind his back and his expression stern.

  ‘Admiral Cox,’ muttered Isaacs. ‘Pity we didn’t succeed in killing that one when we had the chance.’

  Morgan started to speak.

  ‘As your President, I feel it important to keep the citizens of our new alliance informed. I know that recent weeks have been troubling for many of you, due to the disruption caused by the transition to our new government and also due to the Commonwealth’s attempt to suppress our bid for independence from their corrupt regime both with military force and economic blockade. I know that this has caused hardships for many of you. Rest assured that efforts to root out the last of the Commonwealth’s spies from within our midst are underway and that despite recent military setbacks, plans are being put in motion to end the war with Earth’s government once and for all. I cannot yet reveal the details but many of you by now will have noticed the large ship in orbit above Orinoco.

  I have previously said that Earth’s government is under the malign influence of a race known as the Shapers. This is true, but this does not mean that we cannot also find our own allies among the civilised races of the galaxy. Our new friends come from far beyond our own borders, but their recognition of the desire of all peoples for liberty is as fervent as our own. They are a little shy of publicity, but perhaps in the coming weeks and months they will make themselves available for interview. They a
re an ancient race of great power and their ship stands guard over our world against the predations of the Commonwealth whilst we put in place our plans for a counter-attack with their assistance.

  This brings me to my final subject. Three days from now, the war criminal Admiral Haines will be brought before a military court to answer the charges that we have brought against him, namely: an unprovoked attack upon a sovereign world and the butchering of thousands of innocent civilians. I know that many of you would ask for swift retribution to be done against this man, but it is only right that he stand in a court of law and be tried in a just and legal fashion. If found guilty, he will of course face the death penalty for his crimes. That is all. Thank you for your patience in this difficult time,’ said Morgan and began to leave the lectern. Isaacs ended the recording.

  ‘Well that was a pile of horseshit,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there was a truthful sentence in any of that. I loved the bit where he again claimed that the Commonwealth was in alliance with the Shapers, and then announced his alliance with the Shapers. Nice.’

  ‘We need to find Haines, and quickly,’ said Steven. ‘I think we all know that this is going to be little more than a show trial. I don’t know how long he’ll have afterwards until they execute him. Let’s go.’

  ‘I’m still not sure that this is a good idea,’ said Anna. ‘We’re about to walk into a club owned by a man that you pulled a gun on and shot two of his men.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly the way I planned it, but they would have killed us if I hadn’t acted,’ said Steven. ‘Besides, I did my homework before I walked into that bar. Molinelli is a coward at heart and gets others to do his dirty work for him. If he knows that they can’t protect him, he won’t move against us. He won’t want trouble, particularly if the club is full of people. It’s bad for business and will attract the authorities. All the same, we’ll need to watch our back in case he’s stupid enough to try anything. Are you both armed?’