by Richard Fox
Steuben knelt beside Lafayette and matched his pose.
“I relieve you,” Steuben said. “I take up the watch.”
“They’re almost gone,” Lafayette whispered. “Let me stay.”
“Have you heard them?”
“No, but I don’t have ears anymore.”
“Ghosts whisper to our souls, not our bodies. If they are silent, then they are at peace, confident that you and I will complete the mission.”
The flame danced against the wick, growing fainter. The two warriors sat for several minutes more in silence.
The fire sputtered, then went out with a hiss. The Karigole placed their hands on the deck in front of their knees, then leaned forward to touch their foreheads to the ground.
“Farewell, Rochambeau,” Lafayette said, “you gave me a blood transfusion after I was injured. It kept me alive so that I would not be the last.”
“Farewell, Kosciusko. You were the best of us. Your will kept me going, saved me from despair so that I would not be the last,” Steuben said.
Lafayette placed the balls of his feet against the deck and stood up, his cybernetic knees whirring. He picked up a small trash bin and swept the last bits of candle, beads and fabric away. By the ritual, Kosciusko’s and Rochambeau’s spirits had lost their final attachment to the mortal plane. Keeping their possessions only served to attract malevolent entities.
“The ship’s power systems are out of balance,” Lafayette said. “I feel it in the deck plating, see it in fluctuations from the lights.”
“The captain requests your assistance,” Steuben said.
“Of course he does. His engineer is quite capable when it comes to human technology, but ask him to recalibrate the quantum field stabilizer on the cloak generator and he looks at me like I just offered to procreate with his sister—isn’t that how humans do it? Male to female?”
“Yes, their Internet archives are full of reference material. I don’t recommend researching the topic. It’s very confusing.” Steuben got to his feet and went to a workbench. He picked up a slightly curved flat box and examined it. “There’s an issue. The ship can’t maintain the cloak for very long. Our time on the surface will be limited.”
Lafayette dumped the contents of the trash bin down a chute and stopped to examine a tool display with several hand and forearm prosthetics. Each set grasped a metal peg sticking out from the wall. Lafayette grabbed a wrist for a hand with five fingers instead of his usual four, and the prosthetic released the peg. Lafayette grabbed the peg with his other hand and detached it from his arm. The new hand went on with a snap.
“What happens to the ship once we’re on the surface is irrelevant,” Lafayette said. “I will not leave Nibiru until Mentiq is dead.”
“Nor will I.”
“The humans will accept this?”
Steuben ran two fingers across his chin in annoyance. “No, but I am not concerned. I would rather die in the course of our mission and come before our brothers in the afterlife with pride, than pass away from old age on Earth trying to please Hale and the others’ sense of honor.”
“Hmm…old age.” Lafayette swapped out his other hand. “I doubt that will be a problem for either of us.”
CHAPTER 2
The doors to Bastion’s stellar cartography lab opened for Stacey. The immense lab was empty but for a single, unsupported staircase extended to a small platform in the center of the room. A holo projection of the Milky Way filled space around the platform as the shadow of a slight figure moved within.
Stacey walked up the stairs, her eyes glancing over the thousands of star systems marked by icons for known Crucible star gates. Thick tendrils of billion-strong Xaros drone fleets advanced into the last unconquered swath of stars in the galaxy, each moving inexorably toward an inhabited system.
A single Crucible marking glowed blue just behind the tip of a tendril: Earth. A dashed line of a projected Xaros invasion reached from Barnard’s Star toward Earth, still more than a decade away. Her home world was behind enemy lines.
“Stacey,” said a young woman with coffee-colored skin and curly hair as she waved to the human ambassador, “thank you for coming so quickly.” Stacey hurried up the stairway to join Darcy. The other ambassador looked human, an illusion projected by Bastion to help the many different species on the station better relate to each other. The Ruhaald alien beneath Darcy’s mask was an amphibious species with segmented flippers and toothy feeder tentacles in place of a mouth. Not for the first time, Stacey wondered what her Bastion-provided Ruhaald form looked like.
“You said it was urgent.” Stacey stopped next to her fellow ambassador on the raised platform and looked across the galaxy. Bastion’s hologram of the hundreds of billions of stars was as near perfect as science could achieve. Qa’Resh probes scattered across the galaxy constantly fed data to the space station. The lab could zoom in to each star and access a lifetime’s worth of data on the stellar system and known planets.
Stacey had loved the stars and astrophysics since before she could walk. To have such an immense font of knowledge at her fingertips was beyond her wildest childhood dreams.
“It might be,” Darcy sighed, “if the data is right. I don’t know what you did, but while you were on Earth, the Qa’Resh removed the data locks on the graviton surveys.”
“The data we thought might help us find the Xaros colonization fleet,” Stacey said, “if there is one.”
“The initial data was a bit inconsistent.” Darcy’s fingertips danced across a floating control screen. “Then I used your idea for filtering raw graviton data through a brane simulation…”
The holo field shifted to bring the edge of the galaxy in front of the two ambassadors. A Crucible marker floated amongst a halo of stars along the galactic rim.
“So I was right about that?” Stacey reached to the marker and flicked her thumb and forefinger apart to zoom in. A deep-green star with two planets in its habitable Goldilocks Zone materialized, a Crucible orbiting a world with snow-covered mountains and wide swaths of desert.
“Yes,” Darcy said through grit teeth, “you were right and I was…not yet correct.”
“This is Crucible 0-1, isn’t it? The first the Xaros ever built,” Stacey said.
“That’s right. Mok’Tor colony world. The first advanced civilization to encounter the Xaros, and the first to fall to them,” Darcy said. “‘Xaros’ is the Mok’Tor word for ‘death,’ ‘balance’ and the number zero. They were a poetic species.”
“Fascinating, but didn’t you say something about this being urgent?” Stacey asked.
The holo shifted. The edge of the galaxy moved away and a red dot appeared in the deep space just beyond the galactic rim.
“I thought it was an error in the data,” Darcy said quietly, “but it’s there.”
Stacey tried to zoom in and got an error buzz in return.
“All we have is a depression in the fabric of space-time,” Darcy said. “No light, no heat, nothing on the electromagnetic spectrum at all from…it.”
Stacey swiped a finger next to the dot and a screen full of data appeared next to it.
“The mass on this thing…something like this has to be a star, a large red dwarf perhaps. There are smaller catalogued red dwarves beyond the rim. Why can’t we detect this any other way?” Stacey asked.
“It’s consistent with what we’d expect with a Dyson sphere, a habitable megastructure built around a star,” Darcy said. “There’s no record of any species in our galaxy ever building something so momentous, and it’s on course to Crucible 0-1 at almost ninety percent the speed of light.”
“At that speed it won’t arrive for another…ninety-four years. Why haven’t you presented this to the rest of Bastion?” Stacey asked.
“There’s something wrong.” Darcy crossed her arms. “Once I knew what to look for, I went back through Bastion’s survey data, thousands of years’ worth, and retraced the object’s path.”
Darcy flicked
a finger next to the red dot and a solid line traced away into intergalactic space. The line turned to dashes at the earliest recorded data point as the object’s projected course stretched though the galaxies of the Virgo supercluster. The path never came close to any galaxy.
“This can’t be right.” Stacey’s brow furrowed as the line continued to the very edge of observable space, billions of light-years away. “Where did it come from? Bastion’s stellar cartography models are near perfect—that object had to start somewhere. Could it have changed course?”
“Redirecting an object with that much mass and momentum would be more difficult than building the Dyson sphere,” Darcy said. “You see why I didn’t present this to the Congress. Someone would tear my theory apart and laugh me off the stage. They’d say the object is just some stellar anomaly…ignore it.”
“An anomaly heading straight for Crucible 0-1? Wait…speaking of anomalies. Chuck?” Stacey said to Bastion’s AI interface.
“Yes,” the AI’s voice was toneless and curt.
Stacey lifted her hands into the holo and pulled the image down. A great black void in intergalactic space intersected with the anomaly’s projected path. The void had no rogue stars, no clouds of gas extending for light-years, none of the detritus common between the great expanse between galaxies.
“This void,” Stacey said, “I’ve studied it before. There’s nothing we can see or detect now, but the gravity models for this filament running through the local supercluster show something was here, correct?”
“Void designation A-9-2239 held a galaxy with a stellar mass twenty percent larger than the Milky Way. The gravitational effect of that galaxy ceased two hundred five million years ago. This is inferred, not observed,” Chuck said. “Recordings integrated into the Bastion stellar cartography library are no more than five million years old.”
Stacey tugged at her lip. She reached a hand into the holo and twisted an imaginary knob, moving the timeline backwards and forwards. The Xaros object appeared just beyond the void when the galaxy that should have been there vanished.
“That’s where it came from,” Stacey said. “The Xaros are from that void, or what used to be there.”
“Galaxies don’t just blink out of existence, Stacey,” Darcy said.
“Yet the math says that’s exactly what happened in that void. There was a galaxy. Its gravity left a legacy on the stars around it. Then it was gone in the blink of an eye. We need to talk to someone who could have seen what happened,” Stacey said.
“You know someone that old?”
“The entity from Anthalas. It’s sitting in a cell down in the Qa’Resh city. Time to go have a little chat with that thing,” Stacey said.
CHAPTER 3
Euskal Tower, headquarters of the Ibarra Corporation, stood in stark contrast to the wine-colored storm clouds building on the horizon. Smaller high-rise office buildings and apartment complexes radiated out from the tower. Sections of the buildings on the outer edges of the silent commercial empire were exposed to the elements, like a giant scalpel had sliced hunks of the building away.
Feet scuffed against asphalt. The road now beneath her feet began abruptly—scrub desert one inch, a wealthy suburb the next. Abandoned cars stretched along the road leading to Ibarra’s city, many with clean-cut, fist-sized holes in the roofs and windows.
“T…T, what the hell happened?” Franklin asked through the IR. “Where is everyone?”
“Damned if I know, but that’s why we’re down here,” she said.
“Movement,” Walsh said.
She ducked behind a car and raised her gauss rifle over the bumper, scanning her assigned sector. A brief video clip came up on her visor, a dark shape with bent spikes flit between the distant buildings.
“That’s all I got,” Walsh said.
“Keep moving. Stay alert,” Hale said.
The world snapped away and she stood in the Breitenfeld’s hangar deck, staring out into the gray oblivion surrounding the ship. She had her hand on a gurney where Yarrow lay on the hard plastic slab, his arms and legs strapped down with wide belts. She ran her armored hands through her short blond hair and rolled her shoulders.
“Our chaperone is supposed to meet us here,” Hale said. The lieutenant looked tired, stressed from more than could ever be expected from one man.
“How’s Gunney?” she asked.
“Stable. Doc’s got him a transfusion and the good stuff to keep the pain down.” Hale touched the railing on the gurney and looked over Yarrow. “Whoever’s going to meet us, sure hope they can do more for Yarrow than we can.”
Something flickered against the gray expanse.
“I think I see—”
Everything went to perfect darkness. No sound. No sensation.
The deck returned. Yarrow stood next to the gurney, leaning on it to stay upright.
“I said get a medical team out here, now!” Hale yelled at a security team of masters at arms rushing toward them.
“Sarge?” Yarrow grabbed her shoulder and took a trembling step away from the gurney. “Sergeant Torni, do you think the LT will let me stay with the team after this?” A black line appeared over his mouth and all sound stopped.
The hum of air vents and Hale talking into the ship’s IR returned.
“We all have bad days, Yarrow. It’s up to you to bounce back,” she said.
The world blurred and Yarrow was back on the gurney.
“Our chaperone is supposed to meet us here,” Hale said. The lieutenant looked tired, stressed by more than could ever be expected from one man.
“How’s Gunney?” she asked.
****
The General punched a basalt-colored control panel, knocking a corner off. The hunk bounced across the sandy floor and came to a stop. It melted away and the damaged section regrew to its original form moments later.
A field of connected dots in a thick white haze floated over a plinth in front of the General. He reached into the field and watched as the memory fragments repeated, always skipping the exact same thing perfectly with each attempt.
Light flared from the eye slits on his face plate.
I know you’re here.
Darkness grew around the General and the source of his frustrations. Constellations of stars grew into being, as if the General was standing in deep space.
+You are a brute, meant for destruction, not discovery or inquiry. This is not your task,+ Keeper said.
You bade me return when I have answers to the human anomaly. This…base creature has what I require. But there have been alterations to synaptic pathways. An intelligence far greater than the humans hid something from me and I cannot rip it out of the scan.
+An intelligence greater than your own?+
Do not mock me, Keeper. You didn’t leave the Apex just to take joy in my frustration. What is your purpose?
+I’ve followed your progress, or lack thereof. The humans had help—long-term help—to survive the scouring of their home world. They utilize dangerous technology to oppose us. The longer they’re allowed to survive, the greater the chance they’ll trigger a cataclysm. I cannot wait while you flail about, trying to address the issue.+
If they repeat our mistake, then we will move on. The universe is vast.
+No. I maintain the Apex, not you. The others will not survive if we’re forced to continue our pilgrimage.+
The General remained silent. It glanced at the scan field then back to the Keeper’s infinite depth around it.
The Engineer said the technology was perfect. Stasis without risk.
+His efforts proved wanting. The others will arrive with the Apex. We must begin the final part of our journey soon afterwards or we will succumb to the inevitable. Surrender the scan to me. Focus on your mission to cleanse our new home.+
You will share what you learn?
+Naturally.+
Take it. Then you can report back to me once your duty is fulfilled. I rather like the way this has changed our relationsh
ip.
+Your failure to erase the humans put the plan in jeopardy. The others will know of this.+
The star field faded away. The scan field collapsed into a point of compressed data and vanished in a flash.
The General waved his hand through the air and a gash opened in the ceiling. In the space beyond the Crucible where it chose to work, a giant red dwarf star burned in the distance. A small planetoid held steady above the Crucible, and an incomplete net of drones stretched across much of the rock’s surface. More and more drones connected to the net; the sheath would be complete in a few more days, then his advance on Earth would begin.
CHAPTER 4
Cortaro waited at the end of an obstacle course, a timer running down on his forearm computer. The course was a series of irregularly stacked cargo boxes resting on top of small disc-shaped lift bots. The bots, technology used from the old automated warehouses that popped up across the planet in the earlier part of the century, shifted the boxes around, constantly changing the layout. Metal bars ran between some of the boxes, rising and falling as the attached box pairs danced around each other.
A crash came from deep within the obstacle course. A tall box fell over and almost caused a domino effect but the programs within the lifter bots swung away from the falling object.
“Ten-second penalty!” Cortaro shouted.
He heard a grunt and a swirl of light jumped onto a moving pillar. The swirl, a distortion akin to looking through thick water vapor, leapt to another box. It jumped toward a metal bar. There was a metallic thump as something heavy shook the bar. The sound of thumping boots closed on Cortaro.
He heard a muffled curse, and the swirl crashed to the ground right in front of him.
The cloak field withdrew from around the armored Marine at Cortaro’s feet, retreating into a small curved box like smoke being sucked back into a fire.
