by Dan Worth
‘Well I hope you are not disappointed when I show you what we have found. It is quite remarkable.’
‘So you keep saying, then you go all vague on us.’
‘I would not wish to spoil the surprise! Driver, tell me, how much longer before we arrive at the dig site?’
‘Another fifteen hours at least,’ Farouk replied.
‘Can we not go any faster?’
‘Well yes, of course we can go faster. Then perhaps we will drive down a geyser vent, or a lava tunnel will collapse under us and kill us all.’
Reynaud threw up his hands and made a show of despair. ‘Well perhaps in that case I shall turn in for the night. You would do well to do so also Katherine, we have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.’
‘I think I’ll stay up here for a while, Henri. Good night.’
‘Good night, my dear.’
With that Reynaud got up and left, leaving Katherine alone with Farouk.
‘Sorry about him,’ she said, pointing at the door through which Reynaud had departed.
‘Why should you apologise? It is not your fault. That man is a fool. Too much in love with himself, I think.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘I think he has an eye for you though.’
‘Lucky old me.’
Farouk laughed throatily.
‘How long till your brother takes over at the wheel? You’ve been up here for ten hours at least.’
‘Ibrahim should have already have taken over. He is asleep, but I don’t want to wake him just yet. There is something over this next ridge I wish to show you.’
‘What?’
‘Wait and see.’
The crawler was climbing steeply now, up an angled plain scattered with vast geodes, lying like giant, glittering clinkers amid the ash. Ahead, the sky had turned a deeper orange and a faint rumbling reverberated through the crawler, growing in intensity as they ascended.
As they reached the summit the crawler tipped forward, and Katherine let out a gasp of amazement at the scene that greeted her. Ahead, the land sloped steeply down into a wide valley torn by volcanic vents. At the far end, the source of the rumbling sound could now clearly be seen; a great plume of sulphur blasting skywards in choking toxic clouds from the summit of a bright yellow volcano. As the clouds ascended to the upper levels of the atmosphere they began to dissipate, catching the light of the suns setting beyond the jagged range of hills on the horizon, before falling as toxic rain that fizzled off the crawler’s energy shield.
‘You know, many people think that this place looks like hell,’ said Farouk as he guided the crawled down the steep slope. ‘I think not. I don’t think that hell would be as beautiful as this. It is a strange, savage place, I know, but I have grown rather fond of it. It has its own charms’
‘Is there much scenery like this on the way?’
‘Yes, you can stay up here in the cab as long as you like, you know.’
She did. When Rekkid came to find her later, he found her curled up, fast asleep in the cab, with Farouk’s brother now at the controls, guiding the crawler through the night via infra-red, his green-tinted vision of the night stained red and orange by the heat of the fires bursting from the planet’s core.
The sky was blood red with the light of whirling, ancient, bloated stars. As her vision travelled upwards she saw their nemesis, a sphere of darkness light years across, encircled with a halo of bright annihilation and with twin jets of superheated plasma spewing from its violently spinning poles. It was a gigantic black hole. An eater of worlds, a devourer of stars, a bringer of absolute destruction. The accretion disk about its equator cast a baleful light on the dead landscape about her. The atmosphere had been boiled away long ago, the world ripped violently from its orbit as the parent star had wandered too close to the black hole, catapulting the luckless planet into a looping orbit. The silhouette of a broken city lay on the horizon, twisted and shattered edifices reaching towards the sanguine sky like broken fangs lunging at a wound. Closer to, black and angular monoliths shimmered with computational power. The machines within were still active after so many eons. Their humming filled the air like the droning of bees, their surfaces wrought with the tiniest of alien characters that glowed and shifted with the changing sound. The alien script seemed familiar somehow, but they twisted and faded if she focused her eyes upon them.
Turning her gaze skyward she looked in silent awe at the black hole and bathed in its terrible beauty. She saw now that it was surrounded by artificial constructions of some kind. Equidistantly spaced points of light formed a sphere about the black hole, hovering above its event horizon, riding the wash of cataclysmic energy whilst a vast bracelet encircled its equator, drinking the energy from the accretion disk. Her vision swooped in closer until one of the points filled her vision - how could she do that?
She realised that she was dreaming.
She saw an alien archipelago, many hundreds of kilometres across. It was a gigantic collection array somehow immune to the surrounding storm, feeding greedily from it with space-time distortion scoops that funnelled the whirling energised particles into its many hungry mouths, and in turn a horde of things suckled from it like new born mammals feeding from their mother. She couldn’t make out if the things were ships or creatures or some weird combination of both. They writhed indistinctly at the limits of her vision like a shoal of fish in the ocean depths, shimmering in the death light.
Her vision pulled away, then swooped out again – nay, was directed out – to a fainter point of light approaching the planet she stood on. It moved slowly, a delicate mote, bright and fragile against the apocalyptic backdrop. She looked closer, zooming in until she could see clearly. It was a ship, antiquated and battered beyond belief, but recognisably human. Cylindrical modules had been bolted to a frame of struts with a boxy drive section affixed to the stern. It drifted slowly, broken and dying, like a butterfly in a hurricane. The shimmering wings of its twisted solar panels completed the impression.
‘Help us,’ said a voice. It was a frantic whisper, desperate and pleading. ‘Help us, please.’
She reached up a hand to the ship, so far away. She couldn’t reach, no matter how she stretched she couldn’t quite manage to touch it, her fingertips brushing one the gossamer solar panels.
‘Help us,’ said the voice again.
‘I can’t,’ she heard herself say.
‘You are so close, please help us.’
Something moved in the space adjacent to the stricken ship. It shifted against the blackness like a mirage, stars distorting in its wake.
She tried to shout a warning to the ship, but her words were silenced. Frantically she tried to bat the dark thing away, but to no avail. Tentacles of blackness began to envelope the vessel. She heard screaming, screams that were cut off by the writhing darkness. The humming from the monoliths was building, filling her head with a nauseating throbbing sensation. They began to glow with a sickly hue.
‘Katherine.’
A laughing filled the air, a joyless death rattle.
‘Katherine.’
The surface of the nearest pillar had become liquid. The outline of a leering face could be seen on its now in the oily surface. The laughter grew louder, emanating from that horrible mask. The lips moved, forming glutinous words.
‘We are watching,’ it said.
‘Katherine.’
She felt herself being shaken.
‘Katherine, wake up.’
The thing seem to grow nearer, the monoliths loomed taller, curving over to block the sky, crowding her.
‘We are watching you,’ they said in unison. ‘There is nothing that we do not see.’
She screamed in silence.
‘Katherine!’
She felt herself shaken awake. Flailing around blearily, she focused and saw Rekkid’s Arkari features peering down at her. Across the cab, Ibrahim alternated his attention between her and the road ahead.
‘You alright? It seemed like you were hav
ing a nightmare.’
‘Nearly made me crash,’ said Ibrahim. ‘You started calling out all sorts of things all of a sudden. Frightened me to death!’
‘Uh, yeah. It was a bad dream that’s all,’ she replied, her mouth feeling thick and slow with the after-effects of sleep. ‘I should… I should probably go to my cabin.’
She unfolded herself from the seat, feeling stiff from the odd position she had fallen asleep in, and then made her way unsteadily through the guts of the crawler. Rekkid followed.
‘The strangest thing,’ she muttered.
‘What were you dreaming about?’ said Rekkid.
‘I… I don’t know… it was so odd.’
‘What do you mean?’
She stopped in the gangway and hung onto a grab handle as she turned to face Rekkid. ‘Well, I was conscious that I was dreaming for a start, but it was like someone else was directing the action, as though I was being shown a recording… and there were these voices. There were people in a ship crying for help… and this other voice… it was awful.’
‘Just a bad dream Katherine. Bouncing around in the cab probably didn’t help.’
‘I suppose. I must sound terribly silly.’
‘Get some proper sleep, you’ll feel better in the morning.’
She nodded mutely and turned to the door of her own cramped cabin. As she did so she noticed the light from Rekkid’s cabin as he entered. His screen was showing another tract of Progenitor script. She shook her head wearily and closed her cabin door behind her.
It was a long time before she could fall asleep again. The memory of that hideous voice was still fresh in her mind.
Rekkid sat on his bunk, hunched over the slim opened book shape of his computer. The light from the paper thin screen illuminated his finely contoured features, highlighting the hard edges of the crest of chitin plates than ran down the centre of his cranium.
On the screen itself the display was split vertically into two windows, the left hand, displaying Progenitor text, the right hand displaying a translation. He had managed to copy about a hundred or so of the slim data wafers that they had found on the Sphere before they had been taken away from him. Each had contained huge volumes of compressed data in their chains of mathematically arranged sub-atomic particles. Even with the software tools that Rekkid and Katherine’s research had been used to create, it took quite a while for the arcane data structures and programming languages to be decoded and emulated. The result was a mass of data that even Rekkid’s Arkari made computer struggled to cope with. He had had to store the data on a number of removable memory blocks in order to leave enough space within his machine’s storage for anything else.
It still puzzled him why the Progenitors had left this archive behind, as if on purpose. All of the files he had looked at so far had been fairly innocuous, albeit in a military sort of way. He had spent much of the previous day trawling through endless maintenance logs for the various ships that had been stationed at the Sphere shortly before its fall. There had, admittedly, been a very large number. It seemed as if the habitat had been used as a staging post of some kind during the war, however much of the technical language was meaningless to him and doubtless to anyone else who now read it. What was clear was that the Progenitors had suffered terrible losses and many of the surviving ships were badly damaged beyond the point where their own self repair facilities were able to cope.
Perhaps this was what the Arkari government was interested in? Perhaps they had some insight into the technical jargon that others did not, and hoped to benefit the Arkari from fresh advances. The most likely reason though, was his government’s continual desire to do what they saw as the right thing, coupled with their inherent superiority complex and isolationist outlook. They simply didn’t trust others to do the job properly, didn’t trust them with something so potentially important, particularly non-Arkari and wayward academics.
The meritocracy of his people tended to engender this sort of outlook, he mused. In theory, it was supposed to elect the best and the brightest to senior positions. But the side effect was that it not only put people on a pedestal, but then actually provided them with the justification for their own success - that they were better than other people. It often led to arrogance.
The block of files he was currently browsing through was far more interesting, however. It was a record of personal data, messages sent by the people stationed on the Sphere during its last days; love letters, jokes, gossip and personal day-to-day details. These were the voices of people long dead even before many of the current star systems had even formed. There was an air of sadness about many of them, as though their writers knew that defeat was coming, the jokes grim and defiant, the love letters often desperate and yearning. They all spoke of a people at their darkest hour, preparing to make a last stand. He picked one at random and read it:
My precious Etalia
How long is it since I last saw you? Tarunn tells me you made it through the evacuation of the Takaro Belt colonies. For a while I thought I’d lost you for good and that would have been too much. We’re preparing to make a stand here at Bivian. The enemy fleet is on the way, but we reckon we can hold the bastards long enough to give them a bloody nose. We have the technology, but they have the numbers. Still, every time we kill one of them it buys time for our people to get away.
I’m sorry to tell you that Dedarwil bought it last week. The crazy bastard rammed his damaged fighter into the bridge of one of the enemy destroyers but his cockpit eject-tel didn’t work. At least he went out in style though. It’s what he would have wanted. I just hope I can hang on long enough to get out of here in once piece. With a bit of luck we’ll be joining the exodus very soon. Wait for me, but not too long.
My love
Rau.
It was one amongst thousands, perhaps millions of similar messages. Lost voices from a cataclysmic war now almost forgotten. Historians would spend years sifting them, building up a picture of the last days of that ancient, glorious first flowering of civilisation in the galaxy. Rekkid silently cursed his government for appropriating the files and denying them the chance to view the rest.
He popped the memory block out of the machine and grabbed another from the pile at his side. He searched through the contents and a puzzled frown crossed his alien features. This was something different. Instead of the thousands of pieces of data he was expecting there were just a few. He hadn’t really had the time to examine what data the wafers had contained when he copied them, so this was first time he had seen the contents of this block. There were a few thousand data transmissions, but most of the block was filled with a single file which had evidently been stored on a wafer with a greater capacity than the others. He tried to access the large file, but his machine reported back that instead of being a simple data file it represented some sort of executable program and he would have to wait until its sub-AI processors were able to interpret the code structure, decompress the file and repair any broken or corrupted data before providing some sort of emulated environment for it run in. Rekkid gave the slim machine the go-ahead and then sat back while it started to work.
After about ten minutes the machine’s progress display indicated that it had processed approximately one per cent of the file. Rekkid cursed the beautifully designed, sophisticated piece of Arkari technology and made his way aft through the crawler to the small galley area where he began to hunt for something to drink. Finally he succeeded in locating a half empty bottle of whisky labelled for passenger use. He’d found a few other bottles of various things too, but they were clearly labelled as being out of bounds with various messages scrawled on their labels as to what would happen to anyone foolish enough to ignore the fact.
He was pouring himself a measure of the golden brown liquid when he heard Katherine cry out in her cabin. Leaving the drink he rushed to the source of the sound and found her sitting on the side of her bunk, her head in her hands, dishevelled red hair partially hiding her face. She looked
up at him through the tangle of strands.
‘The same dream again?’ he said. She nodded and brushed the stray hair from her face.
‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ she said. ‘But… I’m not the one controlling the dream, it’s like I’m being forced to watch a film inside my head. How the hell is that even possible?’ She threw up her hands. ‘Christ, listen to me: messages in dreams. I mean come on; we’re stepping into the domain of the ridiculous here. Maybe I should just buy a load of crystals, cleanse my aura and give in to a life of flakiness.’
‘It’s not impossible you know. My people have entertainment devices that allow the user to experience pre-programmed dreams whilst they sleep by manipulating the electro-chemical signals in the brain. I suppose if someone has managed to do it over a greater distance…’
‘But why me? Why should I be singled out? And who the hell is doing it?’
‘Who said that you are the only one? Maybe others have experienced this, maybe there’s something about the environment on this moon that affects the electro-chemical processes in the brain?’
‘Someone is trying to communicate Rekkid. I don’t know what exactly, but every time they try others try to stop them and then… they make all sorts of threats. Horrible threats… and then they show me things.’
‘They? Who’s “they”?’
‘I don’t know. The first voice was a cry for help at first, then in the second dream it was more like a warning I think, it sounded… human. I kept seeing a ship, an old human ship like the sort I’d see in history books as a child.’
‘Maybe it’s just that, a historical record. Perhaps they once encountered a human ship and they were trying to show you something familiar. Whoever they are.’
‘I think it was the ship, the one Reynaud and Cox are excavating. A number of times the voice kept telling me I was so close, or that I was coming closer to them and should keep going.’
‘I don’t know Katherine; it all sounds a bit…’
