by Richard Fox
A wave of static spread across the orb to the edge of the cave.
Stacey pressed her lips into a thin line, then glanced from side to side.
“Can it hear me?” She flopped her hands against her side.
“Where are you?” boomed from the orb, the voice low and masculine.
Stacey took a step back, watching as patterns twisted across the orb like a film of soap over the surface of a bubble.
“Here. Can you see me?” Stacey asked.
“You are not here,” the orb said. “Your soul is cold.”
“I don’t know how to convince you otherwise. Given your situation I assume you have time for a few questions,” Stacey said.
“The burning ones demanded much. I gave. Why should I bother with a fleck of ice like you?”
“I came here to discuss history, not philosophy or metaphysics. The Qa’Resh aren’t the most engaging hosts. I doubt anyone else will be down here for a very, very long time. What will it be?”
Stacey waited a few heartbeats before turning around and starting back to the sled.
“You ask about history?” came from the orb. Stacey stopped but didn’t turn back to face it. “The burning ones asked questions a human mind cannot comprehend, nothing so mundane as the march of time. But we are lost if we do not know the path we’ve walked. Isn’t that right…Stacey?”
“How do you know my name?” She whirled around.
The orb contracted and poured itself into a new shape. Yarrow, made up of the same shifting, patterned bronze metal, stood before her, his skin and armor blending together.
“This host knew of you. His mind was a wide pool with little depth, his knowledge imperfect. I wonder if your mind is as flawed.” The Yarrow-orb reached a hand toward her and stopped at a force field that shimmered from the contact.
Stacey approached the force field.
“Do you have a name?” she asked.
“You may call me…Jehovah.”
“No. You are no god to me or anyone else. Cut the crap.”
“Elohim.”
“Not that either. You’ve mentioned others of your kind before. What did they call you?”
“In my original form…Malal.”
“Can you assume that form? The way you are now is…unacceptable.”
The Yarrow-orb shifted to an asexual humanoid shape, its features as bland as a department-store mannequin.
“It’s been so long,” Malal said. “I don’t think I remember.”
“How far back do you remember?”
Malal canted its head to the side. “I was imprisoned on Anthalas for the last hundred million years. Before that, my time was with my peers, working to solve the great question.”
“And what is that question?”
“Is there an end? Were we, the galaxy’s first and greatest civilization, doomed to extinction as entropy wore all of creation down to nothing? The answer was no. We found a way out, a door to an infinite expanse where we could live on…but the others left me behind. Left me trapped in that insignificant speck of a world where I could watch the heavens dim to nothing.”
“Why? Leaving someone behind doesn’t seem very…godlike.”
“I was the one that found the key. I was the one that opened the door for the rest and they shut me out. They didn’t want to pollute their new perfect world with the price I paid.” A riot of colors swarmed across Malal’s skin. “But the door remains. I will find my way back and make them pay.”
“This price, did you pay it with the Shanishol we found on Anthalas? Through murder?”
“Immortality requires sacrifice. My people cleansed the entire galaxy of lesser species to fuel our way through the gate.” Malal smiled, the corner of its lips pulling far wider than any human’s could have. “They left me on that rock, waiting for the next batch of intelligent species to arise. It was…tedious.”
Stacey felt her skin grow cold.
“Your species consumes other living things to survive,” Malal said. “So did we. I managed to tempt a few to Anthalas, but none in the numbers I needed to make the journey. The Shanishol were my last best chance before the Xaros arrived…you know how that ended.”
“Speaking of the Xaros.” Stacey reached into a pocket, pulled out a small holo-emitter and set it on the ground. It flared to life and great filaments of galaxies came to life around her. She touched a finger on the anomaly at just beyond the edge of the Milky Way.
“This,” she said, “this object has been on its way to our galaxy for as long as we can tell. At least two million years. It will arrive in the star system where the first-known Xaros contact took place. No one thinks that is a coincidence.”
“Yes, I know of it.” Malal raised a finger and the holo of the local universe shifted, the galaxies realigning as millions of years rewound. The anomaly backtracked to the great void and the holo froze. “Ah, your data is incomplete. Surprising, but not unexpected.”
An elliptical galaxy with a uniform glow of stars filled the void.
“This was quite the event.” Malal’s fingers floated through the air like he was playing an invisible instrument. A single dark spot appeared on the galaxy and spread out as the holo ran on. The abyss engulfed the entire galaxy in a little over two hundred thousand years. The anomaly appeared in intergalactic space just a few hundred years before its home galaxy was annihilated.
“There was some concern that the rupture would reach us before our great task was complete, but the tear couldn’t sustain itself beyond the galaxy’s dark energy halo,” Malal said.
“What happened?”
“Children playing with the fabric of creation. Technology similar to the jump engines you used to bring me here rip open holes in quantum space to create wormholes. There is a chance—”
“The tear will continue. Yes, we’re aware of the danger,” Stacey said. The threat of a quantum tear had been a convenient excuse for Alliance races unwilling to send aid to Earth against the recent Toth incursion. Stacey thought the reasoning to be nothing but cowardice, but now, seeing the effects wipe out an entire galaxy…
“Did you ever have any contact with the Xaros that escaped?” Stacey asked. “Surely you saw them coming.”
“We noticed…but we didn’t care. Their arrival was millions of years away. We planned to be long gone by then. Would you like to see it?” Malal swept his hand across his chest and the galaxies blew away as if swept by a great wind. The red spot that marked the Xaros anomaly grew larger and more distinct.
A world with perfectly flat metal surfaces floated in front of Stacey, a spherical polyhedron with a twenty equally sized facets. Great rings of metal—like she’d seen around Ceres—surrounded the equator.
“It’s…incredible,” Stacey said as she realized how massive the object truly was. The Xaros rings were wide enough to enclose the solar system out to the orbit of Neptune.
“A fair creation. We weren’t impressed,” Malal said with a shrug.
“What about this?” Stacey reached into her bag and pulled out the General’s faceplate that Elias had torn away during the battle in the incomplete Crucible near Takeni. It was as wide as a dinner plate, but the material had almost no weight in her hands. “Can you tell me something about the being that used it?”
Stacey pressed the corner of the mask into the force field. Static glittered around the disruption as she pushed it through to Malal.
Malal took the mask with its deformed fingers that swept over the armor plate like rivulets of liquid mercury.
“This isn’t the original,” Malal said.
“No, it was recreated by an omnium reactor here on Bastion. How can you tell?”
“The same way you tell the difference between a picture and the true article. This is part of a photon cage. We considered this method to prolong our existence. Photonic bodies are too fragile and will last only a few million years before degrading. My omnium body is much more resilient to entropy.” Malal pressed the mask against his face
and bobbed from side to side.
“Did we kill this this thing when we ripped its face off?”
“Doubtful. Beings that wish to survive this long would never let their existence hinge on a single point of failure. Did its energy dissipate in front of whoever claimed this trophy?”
Stacey shook her head. “Elias said it fled from the Crucible.”
“Crucible?”
Stacey explained the jump gates the Xaros left in systems with habitable worlds, and how the Alliance captured an incomplete gate near Earth.
“The Xaros…” Malal flipped the faceplate over several times. “They’re using the jump gates to get from system to system. They don’t want to repeat the disaster from their home galaxy. Quaint.”
“You act like the Xaros wouldn’t have been much of a threat to you and your people,” Stacey said.
“Would Earth fear a tribe of spear-wielding savages?” A ripple spread over Malal’s body. “And to think here I am, trapped by an even more primitive collection of intelligences. This Alliance is nothing compared to us. You hadn’t evolved beyond pond scum when we ruled the stars.”
Malal pressed the edge of the faceplate to the force field. It drew an arm back and the hand morphed into a blade. It slammed the edge against the seam where the force field and the mask touched, and a cascade of disrupted energy reverberated away from the impact.
“Let me out!” Malal slammed the blade against the wall again. “Let me out of here and I will eat your soul last!”
Stacey backed away, her heart pounding as she looked around for any kind of help as the ancient being attacked the force field. Malal’s rage ended suddenly as it shrank into a ball and floated back to its original place in the cave. The General’s mask hit the ground without a sound.
“You were in no danger,” the braided woman said, her head appeared next to Stacey. “It has tried to escape before. The privacy filters are in place. We can speak freely.”
“A little warning next time?” Stacey asked.
“Malal isn’t this cooperative with us. Good work,” she said.
“How do you figure? I got some nice trivia out of it, nothing that’ll help us fight the Xaros.” Stacey looked at the mask on the other side of the invisible force field and decided that trying to recover it wasn’t worth the risk.
“Malal isn’t the first remnant of the Ancients we’ve encountered, but it is the first we can converse with,” she said. “You must speak to it again, get it to cooperate further.”
“Hold on for a quick second. That thing is millions of years old, passes for a god to most cultures, and you want me to just get it to cooperate?”
“Of all the ambassadors on Bastion, you have the greatest chance for success.”
“I’m the newest ambassador. I have no training in dealing with—” she waved her hand at the orb “and I couldn’t even get the council to help Earth when the Toth came knocking. Explain what cooperation you want and how I’m supposed to have such great success with that thing.”
“You are human. It sees you as an energy source and we can use this as leverage.”
“Oh, that makes me feel better.”
“I will explain more once you’ve returned to Bastion. Malal needs time to feel trapped and isolated. This will enhance your bargaining posture.” The cave darkened as the braided woman spoke.
Stacey found herself alone on the sled and surrounded by an abyss with nothing but her thoughts to accompany her for what would be a long trip back to the station.
CHAPTER 6
It took the form of a black hole, one glowing accretion disk across its equator and another as a halo, as an affectation to research conducted long ago in a galaxy that no longer existed. Dozens of pedestals surrounded the Minder, each supporting a scan of the human mind in various degrees of decay. Some were still coherent, the trillions of neural connections mostly intact but degrading rapidly, falling apart like icicles breaking free from a roof at the first spring thaw. Other scans had coalesced into the human’s face; some screamed silently while others looked around in confusion.
The Minder collated its finding for the master to review and considered the scan in the center of the room, his only success in a sea of failure. If this one lost coherency like the others, he could always make another copy, but the scientist at the Minder’s core hated inefficiency.
Night fell over the laboratory. Keeper appeared as a star-filled nebula stretched across everything above Minder.
+Report.+
Great success, master. After much trial and error, I can access the primitive’s overt memories and will have the blacked-out segments recovered in the next two rotations through a parallel reconstruction and synaptic fusion. My models show 99.999% certainty of success.
+You annoy me with projections?+
The distribution of the primitive’s memories is chaotic, inefficient, and laughable by the standards of perfection attained by our transition to photonic existence. To fully exploit this resource…I must engage in direct contact.
+You will be erased once the mission is complete.+
As is our law. But, given that this is a scan and not an actual member of a polluting species, perhaps an exception—
+Erased.+
Yes, master. The next phase begins forthwith. I will quarantine myself from the other Minders…oh, you’ve already done it. Thank you.
Keeper vanished.
The Minder floated toward the last fully functional scan and spun around on its axis.
You had better be worth the end of my immortality.
****
Torni opened her eyes and found herself in a sunlit glade. The smell of pollen and the chill of a nearby snow-fed brook washed over her. A white robe covered her body as her bare feet played in moist grass.
Wind rustled through tall birch trees. A dove flew into the air from a tall branch.
She remembered this…a summer spent in Falun with cousins.
“Is this to your liking?”
Torni whirled around, her hands up high to guard from attack, her body settled with knees bent, muscles taut, her instinct to fight triggering a cold burst of adrenaline through her system.
A man in his mid-twenties stood before her, clad in the same white robe. Fair hair and sapphire blue eyes accompanied a gentle smile.
“What is this? Where am I?” Torni asked.
“Your mind often comes here. It is a source of comfort, relaxation. But judging by your autonomic response to my presence, I see this location isn’t helpful,” he said.
“You have exactly five seconds to start making sense or I will beat you bloody.”
“Yours is a…delightful…species.” His lips pulled into a slight sneer, then broadened into a smile. “But you deserve an apology. You fell victim to a terrible misunderstanding in our drone programming, one we are just beginning to correct.”
“You’re…Xaros?” Torni felt the blood drain from her face.
“I am no more one of those drones than you are a worm,” he said. “After your ship, the Breitenfeld I believe, visited Anthalas, it triggered a contingency program. The human presence on Anthalas was impossible without the ability to travel faster than light. Examining local space around that planet after your—and the Toth’s—departure revealed you used wormhole technology. Very dangerous wormhole technology.”
“What? Where the hell am I?” Torni dropped her arms and spun around, looking for some kind of escape. There was a cabin…over the brook and next to a well. She ran to the sound of the running water. Her feet pounded the grass and her lungs burned as she sprinted onward, but the tree line got no closer.
“Torni,” the man said and she felt the tension gripping her chest ease away. She turned around and found him in the same place. “We have much to discuss.
“I attempted this interaction many times before. Yours is the first not to fail to psychosis or de-coherence.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He raised his
hands up to his head and took a step toward her.
“I am the Minder, and I need you to help me save what’s left of humanity.”
****
Minder and Torni sat in the grass, he with his hands wrapped around his knees, she pulling tiny weeds from the soil and tearing them apart as he spoke.
“The drones weren’t meant to destroy all intelligent life,” Minder sighed. “The initial drone that arrived in the galaxy was damaged by the species that gave it the name Xaros. The damage, coupled with its self-defense protocols, resulted in aberrant programming when the probe replicated. Every drone after the first was created with two flawed functions: replicate and destroy. We’re trying to catch up with the forward maniples before they wipe out what’s left of the galaxy’s sentients.”
“So the drones that wiped out humanity and God knows how many other species, are an ‘oops’?” she asked.
“We’re terribly embarrassed. We weren’t aware of the error until the Breitenfeld anomaly came to our attention. I was brought out of stasis to deal with the issue,” he said.
“There was…” She closed her eyes as the image of a red armored giant played across the back of her mind. “I thought I saw…how did I get here?”
“We managed to scan your body on Takeni. Our technology is such that we recreated your brain, perfect down to the synapse connection, and now I’m here to enlist your help.”
“I’m a Marine, not a damn doctor. Are you saying you’ve got my brain in a jar somewhere and all this is some sort of simulation?” she asked.
“If you want to be pedestrian about it…” Minder shrugged.
“What happened to my ship? My team? Me!” Torni pressed her palms against her face.
“All escaped, with the Dotok I’m happy to report.”
“Why me? Are there any others?”
“You are the only one. The situation on Takeni was fluid. We’re lucky that you happen to have information vital to saving what’s left of the galaxy.” Minder got to his feet and brushed grass from his robe.
“I have vital information?” she asked.
