Alien Artifacts

by Seanan McGuire

  None of those things were Tad’s immediate concern.

  Instead he reached for the small, odd object that had come through on the late shift last night. At first glance, it looked like a green quartz point, one about the size of his thumb. Tad had found it in the breast pocket of some lieutenant’s uniform. He’d almost tossed it in the lost and found. It was just worthless junk, after all, like almost everything he found when he prepared loads for the enormous wash machines of Lassie Point. More than likely it was a souvenir, a memento of the officer’s first planetary survey mission.

  On impulse Tad had stashed it until the end of his shift, figuring he could look it up on the net later. Maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe it would be valuable. After he’d finished up, he’d brought it back to his quarters. The crystal was lighter than it should have been, and the facets didn’t feel right. They were too smooth. They almost felt like some kind of metal. But what kind of metal had translucent sides? As he fiddled with it, one of the facets had clicked inward, like a button.

  That’s when the weird stuff happened.

  All of the lights—including the emergency lights—went dim. The air mover slowed. Even the artificial gravity had gone out for a few seconds. And for just an instant, Tad could have sworn he saw a yellowish halo of some kind expanding out from the crystal’s tip.

  Then, as suddenly as it had happened, it was over. Tad had quickly stowed the object along with the rest of his valuables, and resolved to forget about it until after the chief’s inspection. Clearly, it was going to be trouble.

  Now, sitting at his desk, Tad muttered to himself. “I hate being right.”

  He turned and examined the green metal-crystal in his hands, trying to find the trigger facet again. He pushed in on each of them, gently at first, and then more forcefully when none showed any give.

  It has to be from of the Argakan Empire. That’s the only explanation.

  He pulled his computer tablet down from bulkhead, and immediately queued up a database search. He took two quick snap-scans of the crystal, and told the tablet to run the images against documented artifacts. In thousands of planetary surveys, and hundreds of archeological digs, surely somebody had to have found something like this before?

  Right?

  While he was waiting for the tablet to turn up some answers, he decided to check the station’s arrival logs. He needed to figure out which ship had sent it over.

  * * *

  When Tad arrived on the teleporter deck, the logs were in the process of being “purged.” Teleporter Tech 2nd Class Hendricks and Teleporter Tech 3rd Class Trotta danced around a roaring fire in the wastebasket while singing songs about the Glory of Master.

  “What the hell are you idiots doing?” Tad shouted. At the sound of his voice, Trotta and Hendricks fell on their knees and touched their foreheads to the deck.

  “Master!” they cried in unison.

  Tad raced for the nearest extinguisher. As he put out the flames in the wastebasket, he glanced at the nearest computer screen. It was a jumble of green-on-black gibberish, numbers and symbols blinking in seemingly endless columns.

  Tad struggled to keep his voice even as he set down the extinguisher. “Will one of you tell me why you did this?”

  Trotta wore a wide grin on her face. “The heretical texts of the before time make no mention of you, Master. They are not fit to occupy server space with your new gospel. They are not fit to be filed in the same drawers as your hymns.” Next to her, Hendricks offered an enthusiastic nod.

  Tad felt like his head was going to split open. “What gospel? What are you talking about?”

  Trotta bowed again. She rose and quickly ran to one of the overlarge file cabinets that typically housed the teleporter arrival and departure logs. As she opened the door, Tad saw that it was empty except for one new notebook. She took it, holding it reverently on a cloth that had been cut out of a Federation flag. She knelt again, laying the cloth and the notebook at Tad’s feet. Then she opened the book and began to read.

  “And on the first day, the Master did emerge from the tabernacle. And he did gaze out over his flock. He raised his mighty eyebrows. And he did say: ‘What the hell is this? Is this some kind of joke? Come on. Knock it off.’

  “And he did take his disciples, Klienman and Park, into the holy tabernacle. And there the Master did say...”

  Tad raised a hand, stopping her. “Hold it. You have somebody following me around and writing down everything I say?”

  “Your words must be preserved, Master. So that all of your followers may know your light and wisdom.”

  The next several pages of this “gospel,” Tad realized, were going to be nothing but a string of profanity if he opened his mouth. He took several long, slow breaths to compose himself.

  “And you’re destroying the teleporter logs to make room for this?”

  Trotta spat on the deck. “Damn the heresies, Master, for they are lies!”

  “Lies!” Hendricks echoed.

  “Stop,” Tad said. “Stop doing that. I need to see the old records. As many of them as you still have.”

  Trotta and Hendricks shared a confused look. But they didn’t disobey.

  * * *

  By sheer luck, the arrival logs from the last 72 hours were mostly intact. Apparently, they’d started burning the “heresies” at the other end of the cabinet first. According to the log, there were four ships that sent loads of laundry via the teleporter in the past two days. Two battle cruisers, a diplomatic mission, and a planetary survey. The last one was the likeliest candidate. He wrote down the name and hull number.

  His personal tablet, in the meantime, had returned a single hit. It was an image and article from the University of Io’s archives. The picture showed a bas-relief on a basalt obelisk, recovered from the Chizran Temple Complex on Kepler 186f. The bas-relief displayed a man on a throne, holding a small pointed object overhead. A carved halo extended from the tip.

  The accompanying article, written by the head of Io U’s Archeology Department, theorized that it was a representation of the mythical God Emperor. There wasn’t much else of use, except for one small paragraph towards the end:

  “Among other mysteries of the Argakan Empire is one that has baffled both archeologists and sociologists alike: how did the ruling class maintain its power over an empire that spanned so many worlds? What method did they use to control a population of trillions, scattered across billions of light years? The mysterious point of light depicted on the Chizran Obelisk might be our only clue. Or, like the fabled God Emperor himself, it might prove to be another myth.”

  Tad, hands shaking, set the tablet reader down on the desk. He reached into one of the drawers for a heartburn chew. After thinking for a few seconds, he erased his browser history. The strange metal-crystal device was, he realized, the single most important archeological discovery in the history of the universe.

  He had to find a way to get rid of it.

  * * *

  Culinary Technician 1st Class Morrison, still wearing his coffee filter hat and brandishing a scepter topped with a soup ladle, stood at the top of the ladder well. He gazed out over the assembled crowd below him. They, too, wore coffee-filter head coverings. But theirs were smaller.

  “The will of the Master is not open to interpretations!” Morrison shouted. “The will of the Master is not for us to bend and shape for our convenience. The will of the Master is absolute. And it is laid out here, in his book.”

  “The Master is praised!” shouted one of the flock.

  “The Master is praised!” answered the rest.

  Morrison began reading from the notebook he held. The speech was similar to the one Tad had heard from the logbook in the teleporter room. Only there were several small, minor differences. And any mention of Chief Klienman was replaced, instead, with Morrison’s own name.

  Tad crept along behind the crowd. The faithful paid him no attention. Morrison was far too busy evangelizing. Tad moved quickly, careful to
make as little noise as possible. He climbed up two levels, staying away from the station’s main hub. Finally, he arrived at the communications deck. The crewmembers there behaved in much the same way everybody else did. They fell to their knees and shouted “Master!”

  Tad nodded and waved. It seemed like the right thing to do. “I need to see if there’s been any radio chatter about a ship.” He fumbled for the slip of paper in his pocket. “The Dauntless. Hull number FLC-2241.”

  The young officer, who moments ago had been sitting at the radio set, shook his head. “We haven’t heard anything, Master.”

  An imaginary alarm bell began to sound in the back of Tad’s mind. “What do you mean ‘anything?’”

  An enlisted man raised his head and chimed in. “We’ve been busy broadcasting your truth to the rest of the space forces.”

  “You’ve been what?”

  “We’ve been—”

  “I heard you!” Tad paced nervously. This was bad. An army of criminal investigators, military police, and inspectors could be on their way right now.

  “Let me see the automated message logs,” Tad said.

  The logs indicated several attempts at hailing, several demands to speak with the commanding officer, and several indications that an Admiral’s Inspecting Authority would be en route.

  Damn it. Tad’s mind raced. He needed to find a way to put things in order fast.

  “Where is Captain Park?”

  * * *

  “I’m so glad you agreed to speak with me, Master. I am honored and humbled by your divine light!”

  With effort, Tad stopped pacing. His feet still wanted to move. This was a hare-brained plan at best. Even so, it was the best one he had. He faced the captain and adopted what he hoped was a posture of authority. “Yes, yes. Listen. I need you to do something very important. I need you to carry a message to my faithful.”

  The captain’s eyes went misty and wide. For the first time since everything went crazy, he looked right at Tad. He looked, for lack of a better word, enraptured. “Me, Master? You want me to speak with them?”

  “Yes. I’m declaring a new holiday. And I need you to tell them about it.”

  “What holiday, Master?”

  Here goes nothing. “Admiral’s Inspection Day.”

  The captain looked confused. “Master?”

  “It’s a very special day. You have to dress up to celebrate it. In the old uniforms, in fact. In exact, proper order.”

  The captain’s face went white with horror. “You mean like in the before times?”

  “Yes. Exactly like in the before times. Because Admiral’s Inspection Day is, um…It’s supposed to remind you all how terrible those times were, so you better appreciate the now times.”

  Tad laid out detailed instructions for Admiral’s Inspection Day. He laid a copy of the Fleet Inspection Manual in front of the captain, declaring it to be another book of the gospel.

  Captain Park bowed his head to the deck. “As you command, Master.”

  * * *

  Tad stood in his quarters as he listened to the captain proclaim the tenets of his new holiday. It just might work, he thought. If everybody obeyed, and if everybody listened. They could scrub the work sections and the living areas again. They could get everybody’s uniform squared away. They just had to make it long enough to pass the inspection, to fool the Admiral’s people into believing that everything was ship-shape.

  Then he could start sorting this mess out.

  He toyed with the crystal as he listened to the captain drone on. If there wasn’t a way to reverse it, what then? He could keep proclaiming holidays, he supposed. Or maybe he should move on to holy festivals. Those could stretch for several weeks, if he remembered his Sunday lessons right. Do that for another, what, twelve years until retirement? Then he could take a shuttle back home and just let the entire bunch of them keep spinning around the galaxy, arguing about which one of his used toothpicks was the holiest. Either way, they wouldn’t be his problem anymore.

  He fell asleep and dreamed that things got worse.

  * * *

  When Tad woke up the entire station was in the throes of a holy war. He didn’t realize it until he was halfway to the mess deck for coffee and breakfast. It was there that two men, each wearing the coffee-filter hats of Morrison’s breakaway sect, shouted at him from an open wardroom.

  “Look! There’s one! Look how he’s dressed!”

  Tad glanced down at his uniform, meticulously put together for the inspection he needed to bluff his way through. The two men surged to their feet brandishing long paring knives.

  Before Tad could even run, three other people tackled him from behind.

  * * *

  The bubbling fryer in the galley stunk of meat, but Tad was pretty sure it wasn’t the chicken nuggets. Tad dangled above it face-first, his feet tied to one of the ceiling pipes with loops of kitchen twine.

  “Confess your heresy,” Morrison said. “Renounce the Deceiver. Or face judgment in the fryers of eternal damnation.”

  Tad tried to swallow. It was hard to do upside down. “What are you talking about?”

  “The false prophet Captain Park has attempted to declare a holy day in the Master’s name, using profane and blasphemous writings. His followers are heretics. Their holy day is a sacrilege.” He sneered at Tad’s uniform. “Confess your sins against the Master. Renounce Park the Deceiver.”

  “But I’m the Master! I told him to declare a holiday!”

  Morrison crossed his arms, laying the soup ladle-scepter over his shoulder. “Another false prophet,” he proclaimed.

  “No!”

  Morrison nodded. Two men in execution hoods made of potato bags took hold of the kitchen twine, and began to lower Tad’s face towards the fryer.

  Just then there was an explosion that blew the door inward. Chief Klienman charged into the galley ahead of a dozen other men. His hair and eyebrows were bleached white. He carried a war hammer made from two steam irons and a broom handle. He wore armor made of old detergent bottles. The men behind him carried similar makeshift weapons, and wore similar makeshift armor.

  “Forward, Templars!”

  Morrison’s men forgot about frying Tad’s face. They took up kitchen implements and ran to meet the invaders, battling viciously to hold them off. As everyone else focused on killing each other, Tad frantically tried to wiggle his way out of the cooking-twine.

  Through the chaos, someone called to him. “Master!”

  Tad twisted around to see Trotta, the teleporter technician. She was dressed for battle. She quickly knelt and touched her forehead to the butt of her weapon, which appeared to be a pair of nunchakus made of empty starch cans.

  “I’m here to rescue you, Master.”

  Tad glanced over her shoulder. The bloody fray was getting closer. “Well, hurry up then!”

  Trotta got to work on the twine knots, supporting Tad’s weight on her shoulder. As she worked, he realized she was humming under her breath.

  “Are you singing?”

  “I’m composing a hymn, Master. This glorious battle needs to be in your gospel!”

  Tad watched in horror as Chief Klienman beat Morrison to death with his battle hammer. Just a few feet away, two of the Templars pushed one of Morrison’s men into another of the large fryers.

  “Sing about it later! Just get me down!”

  * * *

  Tad was carried, under armed escort, back to the tabernacle. Once he was deposited inside, Chief Klienman took a knee.

  “You’ll need to stay here for your safety, Master. It’s far too dangerous to allow you to wander the station. At least until the heretics are rooted out.”

  “But...” Tad stammered, trying to think of what to say. “But I’m God!”

  “Yes, Master. God in the flesh. And we cannot allow the heathens to harm you. It’s safest for you here. An acolyte will be outside at all times to tend your needs. As will two of my Templars, to guard your most holy perso
n.”

  With another curt bow, Chief Klienman was gone.

  Tad’s mind raced. The admiral’s inspectors could be here at any time, and he was rapidly running out of options.

  He glanced at the contraband on his desk. The ID cards alone would be enough to get him fourteen years in prison. Maybe he could convince one of Klienman’s men to airlock them? No. With his luck, they’d probably enshrine each and every one of them, right next to a painting of Tad’s face.

  Somehow, he needed to escape before the inspectors arrived.

  The station’s proximity alarm sounded. A voice boomed over the P.A. system. “Attention, Laundry and Sanitation Support Station Three. This is the Admiral’s Inspecting Authority. Repeated attempts to hail this station have failed. Prepare to be boarded. All officers and senior enlisted, you are ordered to report to the shuttle bay and stand by. That is all.”

  Well, this is it, then.

  Seconds went by. Then another proximity alarm sounded. Another voice boomed over the station’s P.A. system. But something was off about this one. It wasn’t precise or military sounding, like the inspector’s. It was more fanatical.

  “This is the Federation Space Cruiser Dauntless. You have stolen a relic of our holy Master, her divine grace Lieutenant Robeson. Return it, or face extermination at the hands of the true faithful. The Master is praised!”