by Dan Worth
The last body was more recently deceased. The old woman’s pallid skin still maintained an illusion of life in the dim light. She had only been thirty when the ship had left Earth, according to her name tag. She appeared to be nearer eighty.
She retreated hurriedly, with the feeling of having disturbed ghosts. The dead grinned back at her from their tombs. She walked hurriedly back to the lift and went back up to the mid-level. She could feel herself shaking, but from what? The ancient dead were no stranger to her. Perhaps it was the manner of their deaths that had unsettled her so. They had willingly laid down in those devices and gone to sleep, and had never woken up. It struck her as monstrous and unfair.
Back on the mid-level she made for the bridge, heart still pounding. Stepping through the entrance she found it quiet and empty. The ship’s systems flickered and glowed. Screens of data and graphical displays cast a wan glow over the darkened room. Through the forward facing windows she could see the edge of the accretion disk, and something else.
There was a structure there amidst all that light, a dark structure that encircled the black hole’s event horizon. It seemed impossibly huge. There were other things out there too; a spherical grid of nodes that formed the rest of the mechanism. Floating cities that bathed in the energy. Weird arrays and foundries. Countless billions of minds and one domineering intelligence, malevolent and purposeful.
How could she know all that, standing here?
‘God damn it McCullock, where the hell are we?’
She turned, startled by the voice. A middle aged, uniformed man with thinning close-cropped hair and an aquiline nose was sitting in the captain’s chair. The bridge was full of people. Every station was crewed by a man or woman. They sat in their ancient uniforms, staring intently at the view outside or the instruments in front of them. They didn’t seem to notice her at all.
‘Still getting a fix sir, sorry. The computer reset itself when that thing knocked us out of out jump. If Sievert was still with us …’
‘Well he ain’t. Look I’m as sorry as the rest of you about what happened to him and the others, but we have a job to do. Christ, just how far off course are we? We plotted that course to take us around any black holes or other dangerous objects.’
‘Sorry sir,’ the woman apologised. ‘Computer’s working on a fix now.’
‘Captain, I’m picking up a structure around the black hole.’
‘Around it?’
‘Yessir, initial trigonometric estimates place it at around five light years in diameter. There are numerous other structures around the hole.’
‘Barnes, how the hell can anything survive in a black hole’s event horizon, let alone build something five light years in diameter!?’
‘Sir, I… I don’t know sir.’
There was a murmur of amazement and fear around the bridge.
‘Engineering, report.’
‘Engines are operating a one hundred and ten percent of recommended limits sir,’ came a voice over the ship-board comms. But those systems were down weren’t they? She thought. There had been no-one in engineering. ‘Sir, we can’t keep up much more of this.’
‘Chief, we have to escape the gravity of the black hole if we’re going to make it out of here alive. Is there any way we can make a jump in this environment?’
‘I… I don’t know. It could tear the ship apart. The gravitational stresses present too many variables and would destroy the hyperspace envelope. If we could find some sort of calmer area, a Lagrange point or something we might stand a chance. It was the black hole’s gravity that knocked us out of our jump. It’d be insane to try and initiate a new one.’
‘It may be our only option other than sitting here until we fall apart. Helm?’
‘Sir.’
‘Are there any reachable Lagrange points in the area?’
‘That’s a negative Captain. We can’t even move against that gravity. We could move deeper into the gravity well in the hope of finding one, but I don’t hold out much hope of us being able to steer towards one if we find it. We need to jump sir.’
‘Navigation, where the hell are we!? Talk to me.’
‘Sir, the ship’s navigational computer has estimated that we’re…’
‘Yes!?’
‘Sir we’ve reached the centre of the galaxy.’ The woman answered in a quavering voice. ‘We’ve travelled over sixty five thousand light years. Further than any human. The ship’s atomic clocks hadn’t malfunctioned during transit sir; we’ve been in space for fifty five years. Sievert, Patel and the others died of old age like the Doc said.’
The bridge fell silent. The crew members seemed to visibly reel as the truth of their fate sank in. The Captain massaged the bridge of his nose.
‘Sir that thing out there,’ said the man at the comms station, gesturing at the windows. ‘Whoever built that … they might as well be gods. How is that even possible!? We shouldn’t have come here sir.’
‘Alright…’ said the Captain. ‘Alright, but goddamn it we still have to get back. I don’t care what fucking year it is, I don’t care if God himself is walking around outside the ship right now, I don’t intend us to die out here! We could try signalling. The hypercom’s still online isn’t it?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Alright, put a signal out, wide-band. Let’s see if whoever built that thing out there is prepared to help us mere mortals.’
‘Sir, are you sure that’s a good idea? What if they aren’t friendly?’
‘You got any better ideas son?’
‘Too late,’ said Barnes. ‘They’ve already found us.’
In the space beyond the bridge windows, a ship was emerging from hyperspace. It didn’t jump in like human ships; it seemed to emerge somehow from some layer beneath reality. It was large, around two kilometres in length, composed from beautiful ice-like shards that radiated back in layers from its pointed bows. It dwarfed the Magellan as it swam across space towards them.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ murmured the woman at navigation. ‘I never thought we’d ever see anything so beautiful out here.’
‘Maybe they have come to rescue us,’ said the comms officer.
‘Well whoever they are, it’s too late now,’ said the Captain.
The bow of the approaching ship had parted like the petals of the flower, vast crystalline jaws opened wide to swallow the Magellan, shearing off the remaining solar arrays as they closed around it and blocking out all light save for that from the bridge systems. Then they too winked out.
It was utterly dark and silent.
Then there was a sudden, metallic tearing noise and in the darkness the screaming began and would not stop.
Katherine awoke in the darkness of her room. Her sheets and the over-sized t-shirt she had slept in were soaked in sweat. She threw off the covers and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, wiping the sheen from her forehead before getting to her feet and walking to the window. She looked out across the dig site under the dome. The huge jagged form of the ship jutted out of the gloom, lit intermittently by flashes of lightning from the storm that rolled in the clouds of sulphur beyond the dome’s protective environment. The ship was watching her, she knew it. She could feel it.
Wearily she pulled on some clothes and went and knocked on Rekkid’s door. He opened it, bleary eyed and squinted at her in the gloom.
‘Another dream?’ he said.
‘Yeah, this one was even more vivid. I’d say that thing’s taken a liking to me, although what it showed me was… it was horrible.’
‘You want to come inside and talk about it?’
‘Yeah. I can remember a few things, I think. Maybe I should record what I can while it’s still fresh in my mind.’
She told Rekkid what she could and scribbled a few hurried notes on a pad of paper she found in his things. He sat and listened patiently, those dark, glassy eyes of his impassive.
‘So you were on a ship, a human ship?’
‘Yes, I’m pretty s
ure that it was same one I saw in the distance in the last dream. It was old, very old. The damn thing was barely more than a few tin cans with a jump drive bolted to it. It probably pre-dated the Commonwealth.’
‘That might explain the cryogenics. The first jump drives your people built were not capable of anything like the same sort of performance as current models. It would have taken them weeks just to travel a few light years.’
‘True. But I heard the crew say that they’d been in cryogenic suspension for decades. If they reached the galactic core that’s probably true. Even with our current ships, it must take years to travel that far.’
‘It’s quite incredible that they made it that far, given the primitive nature of their ship. I don’t think they even had any shields back then.’
‘Well not all of them made it, did they? There was some damage along one side, but what I was shown the rest of the vessel seemed pretty intact.’
‘Did the ship have a name?’
‘Yes it did.’ She paused for a moment in concentration as she tried to remember. ‘It was called… the Magellan, one of the early exploration ships I think. ‘
‘Well it seems like a suitable name for a human exploration vessel. What with your tendency to name ships after historical figures. Wait a second.’ He reached for his computer and unfolded it. The screen was dominated by the progress bar of the decryption program. Rekkid frowned at it.
‘Damn thing’s been stuck at ninety-nine percent for nearly half a day now. I just hope whatever it’s decoding is worth it. Now, let’s see.’ He opened a window to access the base’s public network and entered Magellan into a search engine. A ream of entries filled the screen, ordered by category. Rekkid selected ‘Magellan spacecraft’. Then pondered the results
‘Hmm, it seems that Magellan has been a popular name for all manner of craft for some time,’ he said, browsing one of the pages. ‘As far as spacecraft goes, use of the name goes back to the earliest era of spaceflight in the late twentieth century and there’s at least fifty vessels registered with that name in service at the moment.’
‘Look for USS Magellan. I’m pretty sure it was USS rather than the CNV prefix they use now. If I remember my pre-Commonwealth history from school correctly I’m fairly certain that those ships were built by the old United States. It was some sort of grand gesture to offset the fact that it had been a joint European-Japanese team that had cracked the problem of super-luminary travel and that they and the Chinese were way ahead of the US in terms of colonising newly discovered planets.’
‘That sounds about right. Hmm here we are… the United States New Frontiers Project. You must have heard of these guys. They ahem… ‘discovered’ my people after all.’ Rekkid raised an eyebrow, and then continued. ‘Ten ships all designed for deep interstellar exploration. The crew were transported in cryogenic capsules and the ship was designed to make one hundred light year jumps, scan for any artificial transmission sources and awaken the crew if it found any. The Mayflower, the Livingstone, the Marco Polo, the Armstrong, the Magellan, the Scott, the Columbus, the Cook, the Odysseus and the Amundsen. The New Frontiers class was the bleeding edge of twenty –third century technology; horrendously expensive to build at the time and crewed by eager volunteers from science and the military.’
‘Except most of them never came back, did they?’
‘No, only the Amundsen and the Columbus survived. The former found us, the latter the Hyrdians and the Vreeth. The Mayflower suffered some sort of catastrophic drive failure, the Marco Polo caught a lethal dose of gamma rays that killed all of her crew and the rest were never seen again. There’s all sorts of links here to reports of supposed sightings. I suppose they could still be out there somewhere.’
‘Any details on the Magellan?’
‘Wait a second.’ Rekkid selected the ship’s name. Another page appeared with a schematic of the ship and a photo of the crew in crisp, clean, antiquated uniforms. There was no mistaking the ship’s utilitarian form, nor the long dead faces that stared cheerfully back at her.
‘That’s it. That’s them,’ said Katherine hurriedly. ‘I recognise the ship and I recognise their faces.’
‘The USS Magellan,’ Rekkid read. ‘Launched from Kennedy space dock in near Earth orbit on the 12 August 2212, crew of twenty four lead by Captain Blake, US Navy. The ship proceeded to test jump from Earth to the orbit of the planet Landfall around Proxima Centauri. On completion of a successful engine test the crew re-aligned the vessel for a series of jumps in the direction of the galactic core. They entered suspended animation, the ship jumped, and she was never seen again. One popular theory is that whoever designed the navigation computer made an error and it never dropped out of hyperspace like it was supposed to. They just kept on going until its reactor core died, whenever that was.’
‘What I saw was that the ship carried on going until it reached the galactic core. The crew said that it was knocked out of hyperspace by the gravity of the black hole there.’
‘That would make sense. Strong gravitational fields would have disrupted the hyperspace envelope.’
‘There was some kind of structure around the event horizon of the black hole. It must have been light years in diameter. An alien ship appeared and ensnared the vessel and well… it murdered them I think. It was horrible.’
‘The question remains: Why would that ship out there insist on showing you all of this?’ said Rekkid.
‘I don’t know. Neither of the ships in my dream looked much like that one out there. The alien vessel was crystalline, yes. But it was brilliant white crystal not black. It was very beautiful to look at, but it killed them all without hesitation. It didn’t even try to communicate, it just swallowed them whole.’
‘Could it be the same ship? Could it in fact be a Shaper vessel? We know that they come from the galactic core. That other dream you had seemed to show the Magellan being assailed by them.’
‘I don’t know. I only saw it head-on so it was difficult to determine its exact shape. But why would the ship that appeared to kill the crew of the Magellan insist on showing me evidence of how it committed the act?’
‘A warning perhaps? A threat?’
‘It doesn’t make any sense does it?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose dream interpretation is a particularly exact science is it? Jesus Christ…’ She shook her head ruefully and laughed bitterly at the absurdity of the situation. ‘I’m pretty sure of one thing though. I think we’ll only get any sort of answer once we’ve found a way inside that ship.’
Katherine had returned to her room. Rekkid dozed, uncomfortable in a strange bed that was slightly too short for his tall, slender frame. His computer lay open on the small desk at the side of the bed, its screen providing a wan illumination. In truth, he didn’t know what to make of Katherine’s dream experiences. He knew and trusted her enough to know that she was telling him the truth, especially since others had reported such occurrences, but it made no sense to him. If the ship was capable of projecting information into people’s brains, then why was it being so obtuse? Why didn’t it just come out and say what it wanted? Was it trying to warn them away from excavating it, or lead them on to make a terrible mistake? More to the point, just who had built that ship out there?
His suspicion told him that the Shapers had caused the deaths of the Magellan’s crew after the unfortunate humans had strayed too far into their lair, but what did this black ship have to do with all of that? How did it know?
Such questions would have to wait until they found a way in and until he could decipher the bastardised version of the Progenitor language that the vessel used. The collections of symbols danced in his mind’s eye as he lay awake in the semi-darkness. His academic obsession, his love of problem solving and pattern finding were what drove his studies, but sometimes he wished he could just stop thinking and sleep. Exasperated by his own obsession he sat up and grabbed his computer from the desk where he had lef
t it to ponder them more and stared in amazement at its screen.
His computer had finally decrypted the Progenitor file. A single icon sat in front of him in the directory of processed files amidst a ream of mere static documents. This, however, was definitely an executable program of kind. Tentatively, he selected it.
On the screen, the entire galaxy revolved slowly before him.
Chapter 18
Isaacs’ plan to sneak off early and leave Anita at the hotel proved unworkable. He arose from his bed, bleary with the combined effects of sleep and a hangover, to the sound of her singing in the shower. He ran his tongue around a mouth which had acquired the taste and texture of stale carpet and cursed himself for forgetting that Anita was one of those people who, annoyingly, never seemed to suffer the after effects of drinking.
She emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, wrapped in a towel, her wet hair slicked back over her head.
‘You don’t look so good,’ she said and frowned.
‘I don’t feel like a million credits either,’ he replied. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t try to get you drunk in future. It kind of back-fired. When you get to my age you start to feel the effects more the morning after. How do you feel?’
‘I feel fine now I’ve had a shower. All set to go and meet these pirate friends of your wife.’
‘Hmm, I still don’t think it’s a good idea. Sure I can’t dissuade you?’
She sat on the bed next to him and pecked him on the cheek. ‘I’ll be fine. Trust me. Besides, you’ll be flying the ship, not me.’
‘Yeah, and I’m in such wonderful flying condition this morning. I need something to take this headache away.’
‘And a shower. You stink of booze.’
