by Dan Worth
After a shower, change of clothes, a meal from the ship’s freeze-dried stocks and a couple of whiskies from his dwindling supply, Isaacs made his way aft to the hold and the mysterious container within it.
It stood in the middle of the brightly lit, utilitarian space; a black obelisk that squatted on the metal decking, held in place with magnetic clamps and hawsers. Isaacs walked around it a few times, but could see no obvious way of opening it or seeing inside. There was a thin seal around one end of the container. Isaacs guessed that the locks and hinges must respond to some sort of electronic key. Doubtless such a device was in the possession of Lord Steelscale.
There was an alternative however. Isaacs was a conscientious trader and he liked to know what was aboard his ship at all times. To this end he had installed sensors within the cargo hold that allowed him to scan the cargo within it. Despite the somewhat questionable nature of some the contracts he had taken over the years, there were some things he did not want to be caught carrying - such as anti-matter or biological weapons – since even allowing such things to be carried aboard his ship without his knowledge would result in swift and severe punishment should his ship be scanned or searched by the authorities, or the cargoes be traced back to him. To this end he had installed the scanners as an insurance against any dishonest passengers who might try to trick him into carrying such cargoes under that pretence that they were simply innocent, ordinary goods.
Isaacs unlocked and opened the wall panel that gave him access to the cargo scanners and set them to probe the container. There was brief wait while the systems ran through their cycle, then the image of what they had uncovered appeared on the small screen next to the controls. Isaacs could see nothing, save for the shape of the container. Either it was completely empty - which seemed unlikely – or else the container was shielded.
Swearing under his breath he adjusted the frequency modulation and scan cycle to probe more carefully and more intrusively, then repeated the scan. This time a fuzzy image appeared within the container. Isaacs squinted at it. It looked like the body of a K’Soth laid out for a funeral. He checked for life-signs or signs of suspended animation and found none. The K’Soth burnt their dead didn’t they? What were they doing with a corpse of one of their number aboard his ship?
There was something else odd about the body too. The head was encased in some sort of device or field that the cargo scanner couldn’t penetrate. Isaacs toyed with the scanner some more in an effort to penetrate this new obstacle but was unsuccessful. Unable to let go of his curiosity, Isaacs ran analysis programs on the scanner’s findings which concluded that the field in question was holding the corpse’s head in stasis. Effectively the head was disconnected from normal space-time in an isolated bubble of reality.
As far as Isaacs knew the K’Soth did not possess such technology, hell it was beyond the Commonwealth to produce such devices. They must have acquired an Arkari or Esacir device on the black market at great expense. But why? What was so important about the head of the dead K’Soth that it had to be held within such expensive protection?
‘Humans are such curious creatures.’
Isaacs jumped at the sudden voice behind him. He whirled and was confronted with Lord Steelscale, who had somehow crept upon him unheard and now stood a mere couple of metres away. Isaacs was suddenly reminded of the predatory nature of the K’Soth as a species. Doubtless a big cat from Earth would move with the same silent grace.
‘I was just making sure that…your cargo was...’ he began. Steelscale cut him off.
‘Captain Isaacs I realise that this is your ship and that as a human you are unduly curious about our cargo, but I assure you, it is better for your sake that you do not know. There are some secrets that some people are willing to kill to preserve, and this is one of them. You seem a decent man, and I would hate to see that happen to you.’
‘What people? The K’Soth still loyal to the Imperial house?’
Steelscale gave a short bitter laugh. ‘If only,’ he snorted. ‘Believe me Captain Isaacs; there are far worse things than the Emperor’s anger abroad in the galaxy. You would do well not to attract their attention. Now please, I beg you to leave our cargo be.’
‘Alright,’ replied Isaacs. ‘You have my word I that I won’t touch your cargo again.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m going to get some sleep, Steelscale. It’s been a long day.’
‘It most certainly has.’
Isaacs turned and left the cargo bay, heading toward the bows and back to his quarters. Steelscale remained alone in the brightly lit, bulkhead ribbed space, contemplating the casket of his dead father.
Chapter 2
The sphere hung broken in space, the two halves of the vast structure lit from within by the wan light of the ancient white dwarf star at its heart. Though the star was nearing the end of its life, only a few million years away from its final cooling to a black and lifeless orb, it sat as if newly hatched from the giant eggshell that lay broken around it.
The ancient structure had been discovered by the Arkari - themselves an ancient and advanced race by local galactic standards – when half a century earlier their astronomers had noticed the unusual occlusion of the white dwarf and the strange gravitational lensing apparent in their view of the background star field. They had dispatched a research vessel to the star in question that lay four hundred light years westward beyond their borders and there they had become the first known sentient race to set eyes on the broken sphere in several billion years.
The sheer size of the sphere was almost incomprehensible. Before it had broken in two its diameter had been comparable to that of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. That an artificial structure could exist of such size was mind boggling even to the Arkari, whose world girdling halos and hundred kilometre tall tree-cities were far beyond the technological reach of most other contacted species, save perhaps the Esacir, the enigmatic plant/animal symbionts whose great wandering cities sailed between distant suns.
No less impressive was the age of the structure. Preliminary investigations placed its date of construction at around six billion years in the past. Never mind that it was far older than any known species still abroad in the galaxy, it was older than the very stars that had nurtured the Arkari, the Humans, the K’Soth and the other multifarious races of explored space.
The sphere had been a habitat, of a type that humans called a Dyson Sphere, home to billions, perhaps trillions of beings. It had been built by that most ancient of races known to history as the Progenitors, whose vast galaxy-spanning empire had heralded the first and only golden age of galactic unity and whose power had finally waned and collapsed around the same time that a disk of dust and gas was slowly coalescing to become the Solar System.
Evidently, the sphere had been destroyed around that time, split in two by weaponry whose nature and power could only be guessed at. Whether the sphere had been attacked and destroyed or whether it had been purposely demolished was not known. In any case, the force of the weapon – whatever it had been – had neatly divided the sphere in two, catapulting the opposing hemispheres away from each other at colossal speed.
Somewhat ironically, this act of destruction had actually saved the sphere for posterity. The progress of the two hemispheres had been slowed and then halted by their own gravities and by that of the star they had surrounded until they had come to rest some six A.U.s apart. When, two billion years later, the star had swelled to become a red giant and had then cast off its outer layers as a planetary nebula, the distance of the two sphere halves from the cataclysm had saved much of their structural integrity and surfaces from the ravages of the star’s convulsions. Slowly, against the backdrop of faintly glowing gas clouds, they had been drawn back towards one another until they now lay a mere four A.U.s apart, huddled around the pale dying light of the star they had once enveloped.
A silvered speck moved across the outer surface of one of the hemispheres at eight tenths of the speed
of light. It was tiny point of brightness against the smooth, dark, imperceptibly curving plane of the structure. It was heading for the broken edge of the hemisphere, the uncannily smooth edge where once it had been joined to its partner, whose concave form loomed against the backdrop of nebular gas streams some six hundred million kilometres away.
The speck reached the lip and swiftly changed course, flipping over the hundred kilometre thick edge of super dense material in the tiniest fraction of a second. It then pirouetted gracefully and headed for a faint patch of light on the inner surface of the hemisphere.
Katherine looked up from her work at the descending speck as it gradually resolved itself into the five kilometre long manta-ray form of an Arkari destroyer. For its size, the ship moved with a grace and fluidity that was uncanny to human eyes and added to its piscine appearance. She watched as its great wings beat forward in a final braking manoeuvre, the sunlight gleaming from its liquidly metallic hull. Quite what the wings were pushing against had not yet been fully established by human physicists as far as she knew, although she imagined it probably involved more dimensions that most sentient life-forms were used to thinking in.
As the ship drew closer she recognised the delicate markings across its wingtips. It was the Shining Glory, personal destroyer of War Marshal Mentith, second in command of the entire Arkari fleet. He was either her benefactor, or her personal nemesis. Katherine had yet to make up her mind on that particular issue. In any case, his arrival meant that he was up to something. The War Marshal was generally far too busy to make courtesy calls this far from home. She groaned inwardly. So far she had been enjoying the solitude.
The destroyer heaved to a kilometre or so above Katherine’s head, blotting out the feeble light from the sun in an eclipse which now highlighted its graceful form. From the dim sunlight reflected back from the ancient surface upon which she stood she could just make out the nano-form surface of the destroyer flowing apart near the bottom of her hull, from which emerged a tiny bird shaped shuttlecraft with its graceful wings folded back along its body.
The delicate craft descended at dizzying speed, swooping down through the hazy force-field bubble above Katherine’s head that held the atmosphere in place before alighting some twenty metres away on a tripod of slender landing struts that extruded from its body. A hatch in the belly of the ship flowed open and lolled, tongue-like, to form an exit ramp, from which – after a brief interlude – descended the slender form of the War Marshal.
Katherine watched him as he reached the foot of the ramp and paused for a moment. He appeared to be admiring the view. She had to admit, it was impressive. Where she stood had once been a public square that had lain between a group of immense towering spires that had stretched into the sky for over a kilometre. Now they lay toppled and shattered, lying like felled trees or ancient Roman columns from Earth. Whether it had been the shock of the sphere’s bisection or merely the ages taking their toll was unknown, but the all of the ancient alien cities across the habitat had almost been completely levelled, leaving millions of square kilometres of tumbled monuments and haphazard rubble.
Where Katherine stood, the Arkari research team had erected a kilometre wide force-field dome that they had filled with breathable atmosphere and heated to tolerable levels. It was just visible as a faint blue glow against the black sky. Many other similar havens dotted the surface of this hemisphere and its twin, protecting hundreds of Arkari researchers from the harsh environment beyond. There, the rest of the hemisphere’s surface was almost totally airless and subject to the bitter cold of space.
Following the sphere’s demise, much of the atmosphere and the bulk of the artificial oceans and rivers had spilled from the sundered habitat into space. A remnant had remained, clinging to the dense base material’s gravity field, but this had frozen hard against the surface when the two halves had moved far enough away from the star that its radiation could no longer keep the air and water from solidifying. The permafrost had briefly melted for a few million years when the star had turned into a red giant, but now that it had fizzled to a white dwarf, the broken artificial world had returned to its frozen blanket. The frost outlined the scenery beyond the force-field in glittering white, highlighting the ancient shattered forms of buildings and monuments and the vacuum-mummified remains of trees and plants. The desolate frozen landscape curved upwards and away on all sides, imperceptibly so if one looked straight at the ground, but look to the horizon and the floor of the ruined bowl rose to form a regular circular wall against the stars. Overhead, its opposite number loomed concave, leaving only a band of cosmos visible between the two massive halves.
Strangely, there appeared to be no bodies within the ruins, not even any dead animals, which lent weight to the theory that the sphere had been evacuated and demolished, perhaps as part of a scorched earth policy, at the time of the Progenitors’ final collapse.
Mentith ceased his appraisal of the landscape and made his way carefully across the broken surface towards Katherine. His boots clicked on the hard, cracked material with every step of his slender form.
‘War Marshal,’ she said as he approached her. ‘To what do I owe the honour?’
‘You can dispense with the formalities,’ he said in slightly accented English. Katherine noted that his pronunciation of that human language seemed to be improving. ‘We’re far enough away from home for it not to matter. Call me Irakun; it’s not as if I’m your commanding officer.’
‘I’m honoured,’ she responded, dead-pan.
‘Glad to hear it,’ Mentith replied, businesslike. If he had detected her note of sarcasm he was choosing to ignore it. ‘So Katherine, how are you? You’ve been out here for almost three years now.’
‘I like it out here. I’ve come to appreciate the peace and quiet,’ she answered coldly.
‘I’m not sure it does you good to cut yourself off from your own kind like this. How long has it been since you’ve seen another human? A lot has changed in the interim. How well have you been keeping up with events?’
‘There’s no hyper-com node here Irakun, so we’re a little cut off from the wider galaxy, you know that. Besides, I came here to be as far as possible from the war. The war we helped to start no less. I try to ignore the news if I can. The knowledge of what we did is hard enough to bear as it is.’
‘Katherine,’ said Mentith with a note of pity, or was it condescension? ‘The war would have begun anyway sooner or later. You were used, you know that.’
‘We were stupid enough to be used. We should have seen it coming. There were too many coincidences.’
‘You would not have been the first to make such a mistake.’
‘That’s hardly a comfort.’ She avoided his gaze.
‘Besides, the war between the Commonwealth and the K’Soth Empire is over.’ Mentith informed her cheerfully. ‘It has been for over a month now, by your reckoning. The strain of the war and humiliation of their total defeat was too much for the Empire and it has collapsed into rival factions. Now the great K’Soth clans war with one another for control of what remains.’
‘More bloodshed.’
‘True. But in this case it could be for the greater good of many. There are liberalising factions at work in the Empire. Not all of the Emperor’s subjects were so willing or so fanatical as the ones that you encountered. So you see, perhaps you did some good after all. Perhaps a greater degree of liberty will come to the K’Soth and their colonies in time.’
‘What brings you this far out, Irakun?’ she replied irritably. ‘It wasn’t just to give me a current affairs lecture. Don’t you trust us academics to work unsupervised?’
‘After your last series of discoveries? No I don’t, frankly. In any case, that isn’t the reason why I’m here.’
‘Oh?’
‘I came here to check on your progress, to install a few new security measures in the space around the sphere, and to tell you that I have been approached by your government with news of a fresh res
earch opportunity. Naturally they asked for you both to be involved, being the most obvious people to ask. It seems that they have unearthed some ancient artefacts of extreme age. There has been some speculation as to their origins, given that they appear to have come from the same epoch as this place,’ said the War Marshal, indicating at the harsh, broken landscape about him. ‘Anyway, since you two are now the leading experts in the field of Progenitor studies they’d like your analysis.’
Katherine’s suspicion was roused. It was rare for the War Marshal to appear so magnanimous, and why was he offering them more research away from their work here? Why, in fact, was he here?
‘Irakun, I appreciate the offer, but our work here isn’t finished,’ she replied warily.
‘Oh I quite agree. But I expect that this shouldn’t take too long. Besides, I gather that the lack of artefacts has been one of the key disappointments about your work here. You see, I do keep a close eye on your progress.’
‘That’s true. So far we’ve found very little. We’ve learnt all sorts about how this place was built, but we know so little about the people who built it. The other teams here have had similar luck…’
‘Then perhaps these new discoveries could link into your current work, provide you with fresh insights?’
‘Assuming they are Progenitor relics. Look, this is all very interesting Irakun and believe me I do appreciate the offer, but I think our most recent find here will provide us with more information. We uncovered what we believe to be some sort of archive, a vault filled with crystalline wafers, data storage devices of some sort. We were unable to decipher their contents, so we submitted the first few of the artefacts we unearthed for analysis back on your home world.’
‘Yes I know all about them Katherine. What they have told us was most interesting.’
‘That’s why you’re here?’
