by Aaron Frale
There was no response. He heard the sound of another device charging. He imagined the worst. Maybe she was using a disintegrator? He wasn’t the type to beg so he decided to let it all out. He told about seeing her with his father, and about how it made him feel. “So if you’re going to kill me, do it. But know that I still love you, and I forgive you.”
The device powered down, and the pistol lowered from his head. He whirled around and felt very foolish. She was holding a scanner. The display on the scanner had a list that read “Checking for listening devices… none found. Checking for weapons… none found.” The “pistol” had just been a computer technician’s rod.
“Nice speech,” she said. “Had you been rehearsing that for me? How cute.”
“Fuck you,” Makiuarnek said. “I should have known that you were a Verdac, incapable of feeling any emotion.”
The Verdacs were a species from a very cold, dark planet. They conserved energy to such an extreme that emotional expression was considered wasteful. The species was slow moving and lived for thousands of years, going into torpor during the winter, which lasted 2000 earth days. Their whole society was methodical, and they had barely visited their moon when humans first showed up in their system. They would have been ignored had the humans not realized they had decrand-rich gas giants to trade.
“Oh jeepers,” she snorted. “I sure did miss that promise ring you gave me to make me your best gal.”
“I’m not asking you to marry me, just for a little respect.”
“Oh come on. I saw an angle to play with your father, and I took it. Guys can seduce and charm, and they’re considered a super spy, but when a woman does it she’s considered a whore? Double standard much?”
“Don’t turn this into a political debate.”
“That’s why I liked you. I thought you wanted to stand up for something. It turns out you are a selfish prick just like your father.”
“I’m nothing like my father.”
“Oh yeah, so why do you want me all for yourself? Treat me like I’m your girlfriend or something.”
“There’s a problem with that?”
“I use most guys before they use me. One or two good fucks, and then get them out of my life. That way they won’t-“
“Won’t what?”
“Break my heart!” Cassie yelled. For the first time since Makiuarnek had been dating her, he saw a real hint of emotion. He could see it on her face, and it all came gushing out. “When you didn’t call, didn’t even try to text, I thought… I thought that I fucked it up this time. I found one that I finally…”
“Hey, hey,” Makiuarnek softened his edge and held her close. “I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll never go anywhere.”
“I love you,” she said. After they had held each other in silence for a moment, she added, “And if you tell anyone that, I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to you.”
Makiuarnek laughed. Cassie giggled, too. It was a half laugh, half cry. Makiuarnek felt something he had never experienced before. For the first time in his life, he felt happy.
5
Death was close. Makiuarnek knew that it wouldn’t be long now. He could feel himself slipping in and out of consciousness. There were long periods of nothingness followed by hate for his father and remembering Cassie. Being with her had been the only time in his life when he was truly happy. Even though he could no longer see, hear, or access any of his senses, he could still feel emotions.
He had never been with another woman since Cassie. He didn’t even use the immersive arcades for pleasure. Even the thought of another woman felt like a betrayal of her. He lived his entire life resisting temptation, playing the long game. It was that damned Nig woman, the one that reminded him of Cassie. She had so much tenacity and spirit, just like Cassie. He would kill the Nig if he ever made it out of this.
His thoughts faded. He felt himself slipping back into the void. He tried to keep Cassie’s face in his mind. It was the last thing he wanted to see. The rest was darkness.
_______
Things were different between Cassie and Makiuarnek now. They were expressing love in many different ways: a shoulder rub here, a lingering hug there. Even though they never verbalized any words of love beyond the day they were reunited, they knew. Knowing that the other person would be there for them was enough. For once, Makiuarnek didn’t care about losing his father or his family fortune. He had everything he wanted. He had someone to love.
They spent the next few months in a state of bliss. She would try to crack the code during the day, and he would help Vigo around the shop. At night, they made love. Their bodies intertwined in a state of nightly ecstasy. When he was with her, nothing else mattered. He didn’t care that he was broke, or owed Lars money. Cassie was all he cared about. He wanted to support her.
It was a bonus that they both had a mutual enemy, his father. She wanted to take down Rasmus because she thought he was a corporate pig with no regard for sentient life. Makiuarnek just hated him. Regardless of their reasons, they worked twice as hard decrypting the data drive. Now that she had a sample of Rasmus’ DNA, she was able to dig deeper into the code. She still didn’t have his password, but those could be cracked. It was the DNA that was near impossible to spoof. Now that they had a sample of it, it was only a matter of time before they would know what secrets the drive held.
One morning, after a night where they had taken sexual stimulants to keep them up, Makiuarnek was asleep in her bed. A pile of his dirty clothes landing on his face awakened him.
“Get dressed,” Cassie said, barely able to contain her excitement. Unlike Makiuarnek, she barely needed sleep and was always up well before him.
“What? Huh?” Makiuarnek said, pushing sleep from his brain.
“I finally know what’s on the hard drive. You aren’t going to believe it.”
_______
Makiuarnek stumbled down to the “bat cave,” as Cassie called it. He wasn’t sure why she called it that until she told him about this ancient Earth story about a crime fighter named Batman. She was really into the classic stories while Makiuarnek couldn’t care less. But that seemed to be a lot of things. She had strong opinions, and he never really thought much about it before. Since he liked her, he just went with the flow.
He sat next to her on one of the various rolling chairs stationed throughout the room. She punched a few buttons on her keyboard, and a verdant planet hovered before them. The stalactite of monitors also mirrored the image she displayed. The world spun on its axis. The surface of the planet was very green, covered in huge swaths of forest. There were a few areas with desert and snowpack at the poles as well as large oceans, but Makiuarnek could tell the world was wild and unsettled.
“What are we looking at?” Makiuarnek said, confused.
“Have you heard of the planet called Nigramoto?” Cassie said.
“No… what’s this have to do with my father’s hard drive?”
“We’re looking at an image from the hard drive.”
Makiuarnek remembered something from his youth. His father had mentioned the planet. There was an alien. He was hiding behind a tapestry. It was all a distant and muddled memory now.
Cassie zoomed in over a spot on one of the northern continents. The green gave way to a thick canopy of trees. He could see the outline of a city near the coast. It was small, probably the size of New York in the twentieth century. The city eventually disappeared on the edge of the map as she went in close enough to see some detail on the treetops.
Eventually, as she zoomed in far enough, a brown spot appeared in the trees. It was a round hole in the canopy. The forest was dying, and in the center of the blight was a structure. It was a simple oval building next to a hexagonal shaped hole in the ground. It was made of circles and ovals like human structures were made of squares and rectangles.
“This is a research station on Nigramoto,” Cassie said before he could ask. “It was built by the Shusharians. Your father’s
research team stumbled across it…”
“What was my father doing on Nigramoto? He doesn’t fund biology research.”
“A scientist studying biology found that the forest had decrand rich soil samples. He thought that if he could find a deposit or a way to refine the soil, he could have a new source of decrand. What he found was much more exciting.”
“What?”
“An unlimited source of decrand.”
“Even if the core of the planet was pure decrand, it wouldn’t be unlimited. As you like to say, even the mighty Jupiter was mined for all of its resources.”
“They aren’t mining.”
“Then what?”
“This video was taken by the Shusharian scientists. Before your father arrived and stole their research.”
She zoomed towards the hole, and the satellite image was replaced by a video. It was a helmet cam from a Shusharian miner. They were bulky creatures with three arms sprouting from three edges of the torso of their triangular body. They wore hazard suits with a helmet that had a visor that could see in all directions. Makiuarnek had never seen a Shusharian before; most UPE folks never had. They were a union of species just like the UPE. However, the actual Shusharian race was secretive, and other species acted as diplomats for the collective. The rock walls blurred past the platform as it went further into the planet. The miner with the cam looked over the edge into the darkness below. There was no sound on the video, but Makiuarnek imagined the lift would have been making a lot of noise.
The rock tunnel seemed to go on forever. Just when Makiuarnek expected to see the mantle, lava, or some sort of indication that they were too deep, he saw the rock give way to empty space. The miner shifted and looked up. The rock ceiling receded into the distance. It was hard to tell the scale because of the limited frame of the camera, but Makiuarnek could swear that they had just gone beyond the crust of Nigramoto, and it was hollow, which was impossible. The gravity was too high on the planet to be hollow.
“Are they inside the…” Makiuarnek said.
“Yes.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“Keep watching.”
She hit the fast forward button. The lift was traveling in the dark. There was an inky void beyond the beam of the helmet lights. Then something changed. At first, it was dim, a speck in a sea of black. Then it grew to a ring. It was an active, wispy ring of white light around what looked like a hole in the universe. He was looking at a singularity. Nigramoto had a black hole in the center of the planet!
The lift seemed to be heading towards a station orbiting the singularity. The platform looked ancient and alien. The design was not of any known race. It looked skeletal, like large, black, bony fingers. There were some Shusharian touches, like a makeshift sensor array, and a dock for the platform.
Before Makiuarnek could even begin to think about the vast array of questions swirling in his mind, Cassie was the first to respond. “The question is not who would build a stable black hole in the center of a planet, but what happened to the civilization that built this thing?”
Makiuarnek looked at her and back at the screen. He thought about the rock ceiling receding from the lift. There was something strange about it. It was uniform and consistent. The crust of any given planet was just continents floating on a sea of magma. It wasn’t uniform at all. The realization hit him. Nigramoto was an ancient alien megastructure! The decrand in the soil wasn’t due to natural deposits. The entire damn shell around the singularity was a structure made from decrand.
Cassie spoke next. “Whoever left this here was long gone before we got there. Maybe even when Earth was just space dust coalescing into a planet. The entire surface of Nigramoto is the dust of their civilization. The mountains are their buildings long after they crumbled to rubble, and the remnants of asteroid impacts. The oceans are the deposits of comets and other icy objects slamming into the derelict structure. The life on the planet, the scientists seem to think it evolved from whoever built this in the first place. The whole damn planet evolved on the ruins of a long dead civilization.”
“So how did this structure survive?” Makiuarnek pointed at the floating alien platform.
“The scientists are pretty sure that its proximity to the black hole slowed its time reference frame and prevented its decay. That rock ceiling you saw on the lift going down, that’s the remnants of their civilization. Without biology and celestial objects to reshape it, it crumbled into rubble. If you are going to build a giant sphere made of decrand, then why not live on the inner surface as well as the outer?”
The singularity pulsed, and the haze at the event horizon began to glow intensely and swirl around. A pod emerged from the black hole. It was the same alien design, and it floated toward the platform.
“But… nothing can escape the event horizon of a black hole,” Makiuarnek said.
“That’s right. Maybe it’s a wormhole. I don’t know. The gravity of the planet would suggest singularity. Either way, it delivers one of these containers every 58 minutes and 37 seconds, adjusted for time dilation, of course.”
“What’s in the container?”
“Decrand. Pure, unprocessed decrand. Enough to run an empire.”
The workers on the platform unloaded the container. After a full rotation around the black hole, the container floated back towards the event horizon and disappeared inside. Makiuarnek could see why his father would keep this secret locked away. This was probably the biggest discovery of his father’s career. His father would kill to keep this secret.
While Cassie explained that anything they put in a pod going into the singularity would never come out again, another realization hit him. His father had known about the missing hard drive. He had increased security but didn’t seem to be panicked over the loss. Not like he should be, considering what Makiuarnek had witnessed. A competitor with access to this information would ruin his father. Makiuarnek should have seen evidence that the missing hard drive worried his father. Unless, of course, the hard drive wasn’t missing, and his father knew where it was all this time.
He had the thought at the same time he heard a charge blow open the door of the shop. Vigo died in a hail of plasma fire, but from the sound of it, he took a few out before he went down.
Cassie didn’t skip a beat. She heard the scuffle and grabbed Makiuarnek by the shoulder. She tapped a few keys on her arm, and all the computers, monitors, and anything electronic blew out with a loud crash. The hard drive was safely stowed in her pocket. She kicked a panel on the wall, and it opened to a secret hallway.
The thugs from the other room could be heard running with military precision to the back. Makiuarnek had run down the dark hallway before the unknown assailants were able to enter the Bat Cave. The hallway ended in a ladder leading down to the depths of the undercity. The people following them found the secret panel and kicked open the secret door.
Cassie didn’t look back and slid down the ladder. Makiuarnek risked a glance and saw thugs in secondhand IF power armor. They were well-equipped and mean looking. He didn’t stand a chance at running away from a person in power armor. Makiuarnek slid down into the sewers after Cassie.
_______
The tunnels beneath the megacities of Earth were like another world. The landscape was very different. There were long serpentine tunnels, buried ancient structures from a long forgotten New York, and even underground lakes of filth and decay. The passages were twisting and filthy. Hyperloop tracks would block a passage and ruins of an ancient civilization would clutter another. Meanwhile, the thugs were hot on their tail, always a few passages behind, a glow in the distance of a long, dark tunnel.
After emerging in a large chamber that looked like it may have once been the interior of some forgotten train station, Makiuarnek was surprised to see underground shantytowns built from the scraps of the society above. People and aliens alike milled about on their daily tasks, living off the trash of society. Makiuarnek and Cassie scrambled their way down a ru
bble pile into the city. The people they passed turned their heads with a mild curiosity.
The people of the town seemed more concerned about the thugs that bounded down through the tunnel opening after them. The people ran to their homes, and some even made a dash for the other tunnels. Vendors with street carts of refurbished goods closed their booths as the market became devoid of people.
Cassie led Makiuarnek through the streets of the town until they stopped at a hovel that had rickety carbon sheets leaning together to make four walls and a roof. She knocked on a rusted metal plate that acted as a door. A purple alien with two eyestalks sprouting from a broccoli-shaped body opened the door. The creature saw Cassie and let her inside.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Makiuarnek asked, looking at the carbon sheets. They seemed like they were only standing because they were propped up on top of one another.
“Safer than you’ll be out there,” Cassie nodded to the thugs that were on the other end of town kicking in doors and dragging people from their homes.
Makiuarnek went inside the hovel and was surprised to see a home that was a fraction of the size of his room. There was a circular bed and a pillow for the occupant, and a large cooler of water with a metal bowl underneath. The rest was clutter and junk. Makiuarnek was stunned that these were the only possessions this creature had. If he had been his father, he would have thought that this alien species was weird and liked living in squalor. However, he had seen plenty of humans in the town, living in smaller places than this.
Cassie extended her hands in an open palm and said some words to the being in a tongue that wasn’t translatable. They exchanged a few words back and forth. The alien cleared a mangy carpet from the floor, and there was a trapdoor underneath. It opened the door and motioned for them to jump inside.
They hopped down into a tunnel that smelled foul. There were about three inches of trickling black water at the bottom of the pool. Makiuarnek almost gagged. They made their way to a dingy room with several connecting tunnels. They took a breather on a large stone block. She was more relaxed now that they seemed to be out of harm’s way.
