"In the name of God," gasped Tertius, beside him. "What is that thing? Captain, have you ever seen the like?"
"I've not," Verax replied. "Sense-op, is that thing as big as it looks?"
"At least fifty kilometres across, captain. Mass is off the scale."
It has to be a trick, Verax told himself. No one in the Accord had the facilities to build a vessel of such size, least of all the mutants. It was as big as a temple station, bigger than most, and yet it was drifting between the stars like a warship. "Impossible. The sense-engines must have lost calibration. Sense-op, full comparison check. Get me a real reading on that thing."
"Thy will be done." The man began to tap at the keys of his control board, but a moment later he drew up short. "Captain! Energy surge from the attacker!"
The magnified view shrank away, allowing Verax to see threads of blinding white light flicker between the enemy's bulk and the surface of Kentyris Secundus. The threads lasted only for a fraction of a second, just long enough for their brilliance to burn a track across Verax's vision, but wherever they touched the planet great domes of white light erupted in their wake.
Each one of those domes, Verax realised, was the size of a city. Millions were dying under those fireballs. "Drives to maximum thrust, prime all weapons! Charge lasers and activate any torpedo room we can contact. Tertius?"
"Sir."
"Hail the rest of the group. Tell them to follow my lead. If we don't stop that thing it'll boil the planet and everyone on it."
The deck shuddered as the drives fired, hundred-kilometre cones of plasma erupting out from behind Redeemer as the ship surged forward. To starboard, the metal splinters grew their own streams of hazy light and began to move ahead.
"Torpedo rooms, fire when ready. Laser crews stand ready. We'll be in range in..." He checked a status display set into the throne arm. "Ninety seconds."
The attacker was growing in the viewscreens, but as Verax glared at it, the machine started to rotate. It span slowly around its axis, bringing the side it had been aiming at the planet around towards the approaching ships.
On that side, a huge crater flared with orange light. It must have taken up half of the rounded vessel's diameter, a gaping maw that glowed like a minor sun. "Open fire," snarled Verax. "Pour cleansing fire right down its throat."
"Energy surge," cried the sense-op again. "It's firing."
For a split second, light connected the centre of the glowing crater to the carrier Benedictus. Verax saw the Iconoclast ship touched, the thread of light fade out, and a sphere of white light suddenly spring from the ship's core.
Benedictus began to keel over. The ball of light at its centre was growing by the second, swamping the carrier. Sparks flickered around it as the fighters it was launching detonated in mid-flight.
"All ships, evasive action!" roared Verax. He was on his feet now. "Pilot, bring us over, hard to port and zed-minus thirty. Drives to emergency thrust. Get us out of here!"
Tertius gave a moan of terror. "Too late..."
Verax saw a thread lance out from the attacker, as fleeting as that which had struck the Benedictus. The impact of it came up through the deck. He felt it through the soles of his boots. "All hands, evacuate. Anyone who can get to an escape pod, do so - we are lost."
White light, a perfect sphere of roiling energy, was expanding to fill the viewscreens.
Captain Verax stayed at his post, Tertius at his side. The sphere was too big to evade, too fast growing to outrun. In moments it was fading up through the bridge floor, flooding the chamber with light. In a heartbeat more it had reached him.
The last thing he saw was his newly appointed commander's hand, reaching down to grip his own.
1. HOSTILE ACQUISITION
Aura Lydexia heard the Salecah artefact before she saw it. When the comms operator reported that he had picked up a transmission, she ordered it diverted to the chant sounders. It was a decision she regretted almost instantly.
As soon as the key was pressed, howls filled the bridge. The artefact was emitting a hellish racket, a stuttering, multi-layered cacophony that bellowed from the sounders like the lament of lost souls, drowning out the shipboard chant and hammering Lydexia's ears.
"God's blood, Alexus!" she cried. "What in damnation is that supposed to be?"
"Apologies, doctor-captain. I had no idea it would be so..." Alexus trailed off, working at his board, so Lydexia finished the sentence for him.
"Insanely loud?"
"Strong signal. Hold on." A moment later, the din throttled back to a gentler level. "There."
"Well, I can hear myself think again. That's a bonus." Lydexia got up from the command throne and crossed the bridge to Alexus's workstation. "Any idea what it might be?"
"I believe so, doctor-captain." Alexus looked up at her, his thin, pale face half-hidden by the heavy sensory prosthesis he wore. "But I need to filter it. If I may?"
"Be my guest."
Alexus turned his multi-lensed head back to the board and worked the controls once more. As he did, Lydexia heard the transmission begin to alter.
Slowly, its wails and squawks fell away. The sound attenuated, smoothed out, reducing layer by layer, until after a minute or so, it had shrunk back to a soft, plaintive warbling. It was as though the instruments in an orchestra had been removed one by one, leaving only a single flute to play on alone.
Lydexia listened to the sound for a few seconds, trying to determine its meaning, but it told her nothing. If anything, it was more uncomfortable to hear than the previous commotion had been. Although it was nothing more than a single cadence repeated over and over, it gave Lydexia an unavoidable impression of awful, aching loneliness, like a lost child crying in the dark.
She shivered. "What is it? What did you do?"
"There was more than one signal, doctor-captain." Alexus kept his attention firmly on the comms board. "Several hundred, in fact, each sending the same information in a different format. This is the closest to our frequencies."
Lydexia glanced around the bridge. Vigilant was a fairly small vessel, with a command crew of only twenty, herself included. Nineteen Archaeotechs hunched in their pod like workstations, attention fixed on their instrument boards, visibly trying to shut the noise out. "What's it sending?"
"Its own co-ordinates, doctor-captain."
It wants to be found, Lydexia thought hollowly. "Record it and shut it off, Alexus. This sector is worrying enough without that ghost clamouring in our ears."
"Doctor-captain?" That was Nivello, Vigilant's pilot. "I have the artefact in visual range."
Lydexia found herself hesitating. What would the artefact look like, after singing such a painful song?
She steadied herself, bringing a calming catechism to the front of her mind. Its complexities stilled her worry within moments. "Let's see it. Full magnification."
At her command, the holoscreen at the forward end of the bridge sprang to brilliant life and blue light flooded over the deck. At first Lydexia was unable to make sense of what she saw there: it looked as though an open, summer sky had been twisted into some kind of whirlpool, roiling around in a hazy spiral and shot through with bars and discs of pure black. Then a shadow passed across that sky, and the scene's perspective turned inside out.
Lydexia wasn't looking up at a blue sky, but down into the swarming cloud layer of a minor gas giant. The clouds were tainted a pale azure by the chemicals within, and wrenched into a tight whorl by some powerful confluence of rotational forces. From what Lydexia could see on her secondary scans, the planet Salecah was covered with storm systems of similar dimensions, but she wasn't paying much attention to those. She was looking at the artefact.
It hung just above the atmosphere, its lowest point brushing the haze, drawing a continuous storm of electrical arcs that lit the clouds from within. From above, it was clear that the object had been built around a trilateral symmetry, with three long spines emerging from its body to join smaller discs, and three m
ore raised at a sharper angle, each terminating in a spear point as big as one of Vigilant's landers.
A board next to Lydexia's throne chimed, and she looked back to see a holographic image of the artefact building itself in the air behind her. In three dimensions it was even more baffling - a slender spindle projecting up from a massive central dish, capped with smaller domes at either end. The dish was upturned and filled with great pods and cylinders. It looked like a spear thrust through a fruit bowl, if the spear had been a kilometre long.
Tiny motes flocked and circled around the object. Some kind of flying creatures, Lydexia guessed. She'd have to factor those into her bioscans.
"Very well, Archaeotechs. Our task begins. Per cognitio, ad salus."
The rest of the bridge crew murmured a response. Lydexia began tapping at the control boards set into the arms of her throne, uploading area designations to Vigilant's tactical array. Quick, colourful descriptions that could be easily remembered: the arena, the outriggers, the punchbowl.
"Run preliminary sense sweeps, full bio and power emanation series. Nivello, bring us to within a thousand kilometres and then keep position. Tell the Lamarion to circle at ten thousand. Ruida, I'm picking up a breathable gas trace around the artefact. Can that be right?"
Ruida was Vigilant's sensor tech. She was very young, her shaved head barely marked by the division's ritual circuit tattoos. Lydexia saw her studying her board holos, checking her facts one last time. "It is, doctor-captain. The main atmosphere is nitrogen, methane, a little water-ice. Nothing you'd want to breathe. But there's a thin layer of breathable gas just above that, maybe ten kilometres thick. Probably a gravity capture."
The artefact had been stationed right in that layer, hung there on its grav-lifters and left to sing its haunting, lonely songs into the night. "That answers one question," Lydexia announced. "The artefact isn't here by accident. Someone knew just where to put it."
She stood up. "Nivello, you have command. I'll be down at the lander racks until acquisition."
"Thy will be done," nodded the pilot.
Lydexia saluted the back of his head, and then made her way off the bridge. As she left, she noticed that Alexus still hadn't shut the artefact's transmission off.
Its lament was in her ears all the way down to the racks.
Vigilant was a standard design of Archaeotech procurement clipper: five hundred metres of drives and pressure cylinders hung beneath a diamond shaped wing, and studded with sense-engine pickups. The vessel had little in the way of weapons. Most of its bulk was taken up by the lander racks, a double row of fast cargo shuttles held in powered launch clamps. It was an unlovely vessel, built for one purpose only: to transport an Archaeotech acquisition team to their target site, provide them with huge amounts of scan data and then let them scour the site for artefacts in as short a time as possible. If it came to a fight, and such things were always possible, it would be up to Lamarion to protect the clipper.
Then again, Lamarion was a fully armed killship, a dreadnought class war vessel. It was quite capable of protecting Vigilant from most things.
All except time, thought Lydexia as she headed down to the racks. Time was always an Archaeotech's worst enemy. From the moment a site was discovered, the clock was ticking. Harvesters, nomadic communities of space-going scavengers, listened in on many of the comms channels that the Archaeotechs used to locate their quarry. They would descend on any target they considered ripe for picking, be it a lost starship, a forgotten battlefield, even an alien construction like the Salecah object. Once they were done making their profits, there would be precious little left for the Archaeotechs to pore over.
There were the Tenebrae to consider too - wandering bands of mutant extremists, eager to claim any place or object they considered to be of religious significance. And most dangerous of all, in many ways, were the Iconoclasts themselves. Although nominally all part of the same military force, few other divisions shared the Archaeotechs' passion for lost technologies. Most considered such things heretical, forbidden, dangers to be wiped from the face of the universe. Lydexia couldn't allow herself to consider how many priceless artefacts might have been lost to the hunger guns of superstitious admirals. The thought was too upsetting.
If all the factors were taken into consideration - Harvesters, Tenebrae patrols, unsympathetic Iconoclast commanders petitioning the Patriarch to have their protection edicts overturned - an Archaeotech acquisition team could consider itself lucky to get ten days at any newly discovered site. In some cases, the actual time was less than ten hours.
Lydexia, who had been on acquisition missions before, had a countdown display fitted into the wrist of her uniform armour. She tuned it to ten hours as she entered the lander rack airlock, and set it ticking.
There was a small staging chapel between the lock and the racks, where the mission leaders would equip themselves and make final devotions before embarking on their tasks. Lydexia had been supplied with a full complement of four researcher-lieutenants for the Salecah acquisition and, in accordance with Archaeotech custom, all were in the chapel before her.
As the airlock opened, they turned to Lydexia and bowed.
That froze her, just for a second. Salecah was her first acquisition as mission leader, her first selection since she had been promoted. She thought she had gotten used to the idea, but the salute from five men and women who had been, until not very long ago, her fellow Researchers almost stopped her in her tracks.
"At ease," she said, trying to keep her voice level. Reflexively she put a hand up to her head, ran it back over her scalp. The newest set of tattoos there still itched. "We'll go over the primary scans now, agreed? There's no telling how badly these transmissions are going to affect lander comms once we're in flight." There were a couple of nods when she said that, and Lydexia relaxed a little. One correct decision today, at least.
"Quartus," she continued. "What are the conditions like down there?"
The Researcher took a pace forwards. "Cold, doctor-captain. Salecah itself is throwing out some heat, but don't expect the ambient to rise past minus thirty."
"But the air's breathable?"
"For a while. If we're down there for any more than thirty hours I'd recommend breathe-masks."
Lydexia raised an eyebrow. "We should have such luck." Salecah was outside the coreward edge of the Accord, several light-years into the lawless, sparsely populated sector known as the Vermin Stars. That, coupled with the volume of the artefact's siren calls, made her wonder if this mission wouldn't set a new record for brevity. "I'll personally buy everyone double rations if we're here for more than ten. And don't look like that, Dema. I consider my stipend safe."
"I've no doubt, doctor-captain," replied Dema. She was the youngest of the four researchers, just a year or two older than Lydexia. Like Alexus, she'd had a sensory prosthesis fitted across her eyes to augment her vision. One large lens gleamed on the left, balanced by a cluster of smaller sensors on the right. "I've analysed the gravity field surrounding the object. It appears stable on the main body, averaging about point-nine standard gees. That only fluctuates at the three outriggers."
"Gravity anchors?"
"It seems likely."
"Very well." Lydexia crossed the chapel, halting at the armoured locker that contained her field equipment. She held her crypt-disc to the door panel, and the magnetic latches thumped back into their housings. "Dema, your team will investigate the outriggers. I'll let you choose which one." She saw Dema smile wryly: all three outriggers were identical. "Get whatever hardware pertaining to the gravity anchors you can, but don't do anything that might unbalance the artefact until the last minute. If needs be I'll have Lamarion blast one free for you and we can tow it home."
"Your will, doctor-captain."
Lydexia was already shrugging into her cowl, a long hooded cloak of rubberised impact armour, jet black like the rest of her uniform. She sealed it around her waist, making sure it hung loose and free around her le
gs. "Quartus, you'll take the arena. Try not to get too close to the edge: there's no rail that we can see, and a sheer drop of eight hundred metres into the punchbowl."
"I'll make sure my helots are well tethered."
Lydexia had a small cache of specialised detection equipment in the locker. Her technicians would carry the usual sensing gear - quantum tracers, maser rangefinders, and so on - but there were some devices that were unique to her speciality, and therefore under her purview alone. She touched another crypt-disc to a secondary locker inside the first, and this too slid open, its lid hinging up. "Ortina?"
"Yes, my lady?"
"Set your team down into the punchbowl." This was the main body of the artefact, an upturned dome of rusting metal plate three hundred metres across. "Find what you can there, and then begin working your way up into the habitation cylinders. Lotonus will begin at the upper pods and work down, so once you meet in the middle, join forces and spread out into the pressure spheres."
"Doctor-captain?" Lotonus was plainly surprised. "Forgive me, but I thought you'd take that honour. Surely the richest pickings will be in the habitation cylinders."
She turned to him and smiled. "That all depends on what you consider valuable, my friend."
He bowed and stepped back. It was Lydexia's privilege to pick her own target areas, after all. "Thy will be done, doctor-captain. And your guard?"
"Commander Hirundo will take that task." She glanced at the countdown display. "We'll be using all ten landers, and five full squads of Custodes. Remember that we are very far from home here. The reputation of the Vermin Stars isn't an idle one. We've lost people closer to the core systems than this."
"You anticipate danger?" asked Dema. The woman's eye-lenses whined as they rotated in nervous counter-focus. "There are rumours..."
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