by R. A. Nargi
The question was, would there be any more living after today?
We were stuck in this system with a Hammerhead-class Mayir carrier getting ready to blow us into oblivion once they fixed their weapons systems. They knew we had no place to go, because the only way out of this system was through a jumpgate that they had taken out. With the help of a traitorous Rhya, of course.
That’s what really got me. It was almost laughable. You had this mighty advanced race of beings who portrayed themselves as benevolent guardians of the universe. But one went bad. Sold out his entire race. For what? That’s what I was really curious about. What do you offer a being of advanced intelligence to convince him to turn traitor?
I didn’t hold out much hope for learning the answer to that particular question.
The weapons systems controller sounded a gentle bell to announce that the re-calibration was complete and that the diagnostics hadn’t uncovered any sync errors or anything else.
“Looks like we’re all good on the weapons systems check,” I announced.
“Okay, Jannigan,” the Sean bot said. “Come down to the bridge. There’s something I want to discuss with everyone.”
That sounded serious. I climbed down out of the turret. Everyone was standing except the Sean bot. He gestured at the empty pilot’s seat.
“Sit down, JJ.”
“Isn’t that your seat?”
“Look at me, son. I could literally stand forever and not feel it. Sit down.”
“What is that, bot humor?” I shook my head, but sat down anyway.
“Listen,” the Sean bot said. “We don’t have much time.” He stood up a little straighter.
“Sean, is this the point when you tell us you’ve got everything figured out, and we’re going to get out of this okay?” Ana-Zhi smirked at him.
“I wish, Z,” he said. “Fact is we don’t have a lot of options. There’s really only one that I see, but it involves something incredibly dangerous.”
“Is that a joke?” I said. “I mean, more dangerous than a Mayir warship?”
“Don’t be dramatic, JJ, but yes, this is a lot more dangerous.” He turned to Chiraine. “Young lady, in your studies, did you ever come across something called the Levirion?”
“Levirion? Is that a place?”
“No, it’s a device. From ancient Marimora.”
Chiraine shook her head.
I had heard of Marimora, of course, but it was supposed to be a mythological planetary system that appeared in some of the legends of Lacedon, like three thousand years ago.
“It turns out that the Mayir were very keen on finding the Levirion,” the Sean bot said. “It was right up there with the Kryrk in terms of priority for them.”
“How do you know that?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“I spent two and a half days accessing the Mayir’s computers and data archives.”
I was dumbfounded. “How?”
“I don’t really have time to tell you the whole story, but suffice it to say I hid in a crate full of artifacts that was brought on board the Baeder from Bandala. Then I escaped and holed up between levels nine and ten, in an emergency access shaft strung with data fiber, among other things. Let’s just say that their internal data security leaves something to be desired.”
“You got the Mayir’s archaeological research?” Chiraine asked in a quiet voice, tinged with excitement.
“A big chunk of it.”
“Wait a minute, Sean,” Ana-Zhi said. “Let’s get back to this Leviathan thing.”
“It’s Levirion.”
“Okay, but you haven’t told us what this thing is or even what it looks like—”
The Sean bot cut her off. “It looks like this.” He placed a fist-sized object on the console.
We all moved closer to get a better look.
The object was a small metal pyramid, maybe ten centimeters on a side. Each side of the pyramid had been etched with strange complex symbols carved into the metal. They were all different.
“This is crazy,” Chiraine said, leaning even closer. “Those symbols look like they’re ancient Ordanka.”
“They’re not,” the Sean bot said. “They’re maps.”
“Maps?” Narcissa asked. “To where?”
“The Mayir researchers never got that far. But they did manage to translate a fragment of the Dervock Manuscript which mentions the Levirion.”
Chiraine’s face scrunched up in thought. “Wait,” she said. “The Dervock Manuscript?”
“Yes. Specifically Dervock L77.”
“Holy shit.” All the color drained from Chiraine’s face. “It can’t be…”
“You guys mind letting the rest of us in on what you’re talking about?” Ana-Zhi said.
“I had heard of the Levirion, of course,” the Sean bot said. “And by combing through the Ambit, I found that it was being stored in Bandala. I eventually found it and squirreled it away.”
“So it has been sitting in the Vostok’s hold for the past three days?”
“Correct, son. I didn’t know what the Levirion could do at the time.”
Ana-Zhi snatched the pyramid up from the console. “I’m going to chuck this thing out of an airlock unless someone tells me what exactly it’s supposed to do.”
“I’d be a little more careful with that, Z,” the Sean bot said. “The ancient Marimorans referred to the Levirion as ‘the Hive of Worlds.’ But we’d call it a dark space jump gate.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. Jump gates were colossal mechanized structures the size of space stations. Furthermore they required a massive energy source. You couldn’t put one in something the size of a small grapefruit.
“So, wait, you think that this little thing will get us home?” Ana-Zhi asked.
The Sean bot shook his head. “That’s the problem. Even if we can get this thing to work, it won’t send us home. According to Dervock L77, the Levirion will send us to one of the four locations depicted on the maps on each of its sides.”
“Wait a second.” I pointed to the Levirion. “That thing is a mini jump gate? That sends you to a random location?” I couldn’t get my head around it.
“Not random,” the Sean bot said. “If you were a Marimoran, that is. They probably knew how to control it, so it was akin to our own jump gates, but with more options.”
I still didn’t follow. Our galaxy had hundreds of thousands of paired jump gates connecting certain solar systems. But each gate just linked a point A with a point B. You went in the gate at point A and came out at point B. Simple.
“So this would be a one-way jump?” Narcissa asked.
“That’s my understanding,” the Sean bot said.
“With no way of knowing where we’d end up?”
“Correct.”
“I still can’t understand how something this small would even work,” I said. Normal jump gates were large enough to fly a ship through. Usually at least 250 meters in diameter.
“I would guess it is able to create some sort of spatial displacement field,” Narcissa said.
“You guess?” I asked.
Chiraine had been quiet for a while, just staring at the Levirion, mesmerized. But she looked up and asked, “So how do we get it to work?”
Ana-Zhi said, “Hang on there, princess. I’m not sure we should even be talking about this.”
“Of course we should,” Chiraine said. “What other choice do we have?”
“We can try to run,” Ana-Zhi said. “Get to the outer rim.”
“You know as well as I do that we won’t be able to outrun a Hammerhead-class Scout,” the Sean bot said.
“Then we turn and fight.”
The Sean bot made a little robotic snorting sound. “Their shuttle is more heavily armed than we are.”
That was kind of an exaggeration, but he was right. There was no way the Vostok could match the firepower of the Baeder.
“Getting back to Chiraine’s question—how do we get it to work?” Narcissa asked.
“Not you too?” Ana-Zhi shook her head.
“Dervock L77 doesn’t specify how exactly the Levirion works,” the Sean bot said.
“Great,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Other than it needs to be activated by a—and I quote—dire inferno. Whatever that is.”
“Dire inferno?” Chiraine made a face. “So we burn it?”
“The Mayir researchers who studied this were of the opinion that the dire inferno referred to a significant power source,” the Sean bot said. “And I was thinking that the Fountain’s reactors might just do the trick.”
Ana-Zhi burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny, Z?” the Sean bot asked.
“Are you even listening to what’s coming out of your tight little robot mouth?”
“How about you enlighten me,” the Sean bot said sharply.
“It’s just that if we could turn the Fountain’s reactors on, we wouldn’t need your little magic pyramid. Would we?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Ana-Zhi.”
Ana-Zhi turned to Chiraine. “Tell him what you told us, princess.”
Chiraine explained about the Shimese research she had uncovered that indicated there was a strong possibility that the Fountain didn’t fully close.
“If we could power the Fountain back up, it might provide one-way access back to Tor-Betree.”
15
Maybe the Baeder had been damaged more than we thought, or maybe the Mayir were just supremely confident that we couldn’t get away. Whatever the reason, they didn’t come after us for nearly three hours. And by that time, we were almost at the Fountain.
Chiraine had spent the time scanning through the data the Sean bot had liberated from the Mayir’s research computers. She had compiled it with her own data and was now running multiple semantic searches on the Levirion, trying to find out anything else that might help us.
In the meantime, the Sean bot had decided to clone a partition of our point defense and targeting AI systems and basically reprogram them.
“You sure that this is the best time to be doing this?” I had asked him.
“Are you kidding me? These systems are so primitive, it’s no wonder you had to go manual.”
After locking in a course to the Fountain, Narcissa, Ana-Zhi, and I had retired to the galley for some lunch and moxa. Narcissa had routed the long-range scanner display down to the galley’s datapads, so we could keep one eye open while we rested up and ate.
I was halfway through my second cup of moxa when the klaxons went off.
We all met back up on the bridge, where the first thing I noticed was the Fountain looming up in our main viewport. It seemed so close that we could pass through its immense torus at any moment. But I knew that our true destination was the mushroom-shaped control station perched on the edge of the Fountain’s ring.
“How far away is the Baeder?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Based on their current speed, eleven minutes until intercept,” the Sean bot said.
“And how long until we reach the control station?” I asked.
“If Ana-Zhi tightened our approach like she’s supposed to, maybe ten minutes. Nine and a half, best case scenario.”
“Not good enough,” the Sean bot said. He explained that if we could get inside the hangar, there would be less chance of the Mayir blasting us into oblivion because they wouldn’t want to risk damaging their only way back to our galaxy.
I pointed out that the Mayir might not be so logical about things.
“We’ll see,” the Sean bot said. “There’s the hangar entrance.”
“I got it,” Ana-Zhi said. She adjusted our course with the maneuvering thrusters.
“I need to take over,” the Sean bot said. “Move, please.”
“Yes, captain,” Ana-Zhi huffed as she got out of the pilot’s seat.
“No offense, Z, we’re going to try a hard slide in, and I’ve got the trajectory figured out.”
“Oh yeah? That’s what the navsys is for.”
The Sean bot slammed the main thrusters and the Vostok’s engines groaned in complaint, shaking the entire superstructure as we did a hard burn. “Hang on!”
“Somehow I don’t think the navsys would have allowed a move like that,” Narcissa said.
“What does the scope say about the entrance tunnel?” the Sean bot demanded. “I really hope it’s less than one hundred meters.”
Narcissa double checked the ranging scanners and then announced, “One hundred ten.”
“This is going to be close.”
Up on the main viewport I saw the hangar entrance getting larger and larger as we raced towards it. But still it was a relatively small dark rectangle on the surface of the station’s massive domed solar collector.
We were all silent for several minutes as the Fountain loomed closer and closer. It really was a remarkable feat of engineering.
“I’ve found schematics!” Chiraine looked up from her data pad with a big grin on her face.
“How?” the Sean bot asked.
“It’s from the Rhya themselves. Part of the 2355 technology exchange. I had them loaded during mission prep.”
“Well done, young lady. Route everything to screen four, if you please.”
Chiraine did so and the screen lit up with a detailed 3-D view of the control station. It really did look like a giant mushroom, roughly a kilometer tall with a two-hundred-meter diameter central core.
The hangar was located inside of the solar collector, which formed the cap of the mushroom.
“It looks like this thing isn’t much more than a giant capacitor,” Narcissa said.
“That’s not far off the mark,” the Sean bot said. “Most of the central core is devoted to energy storage. It looks like the solar arrays augment the primary reactor.”
“Where’s that?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Right at the bottom. Chiraine, zoom in for us.”
The image grew in size until the bottom of the control station filled the screen. The primary reactor appeared to be a two-hundred-meter diameter sphere suspended in an inner chamber.
“That’s where we need to take the Levirion,” the Sean bot said.
“Wait,” I said. “We’re going in up here?” I pointed to the hangar area at the top of the station.
“Yes.”
“And we need to get down there?”
“Yes.”
“That’s over seven hundred meters.”
“I’m aware of that, JJ. I’ve been ingesting these schematics as we speak. Chiraine, you might want to send them to everyone’s Aura.”
“Will do,” she replied.
“Time check?” the Sean bot asked. “Anyone?”
I was certain that he knew exactly what the elapsed time was. This was just my dad’s way of ‘managing’ us.
“Four minutes until intercept,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Jannigan, get up to the turret and prepare the torps.”
“The Mayir are still out of range,” I said.
“They won’t be for long.”
That was true. I climbed up and got settled in the swing seat as the weapons controller flashed to life.
“JJ, we primed? I want the plasma heads.”
I confirmed with the AI-assist, then said, “Yeah, tubes are loaded.”
“Keep it manual, son. You’re going to be targeting the tunnel superstructure.”
“Not the Baeder?”
“Negative. We want to get in there and close the door.”
“But there are other entrances,” I said. “This isn’t the only way in.” I had the schematics up on my Aura and counted at least five other tunnels into the main hangar.
“This is the only entrance large enough to accommodate a ship the size of the Baeder,” the Sean bot said. “Now focus, will you, JJ?”
I still wasn’t convinced that blasting the Fountain was the smartest idea. We didn’t know if it had any sort of point defense systems that might lock on us and b
low us into space dust. But it was pretty clear that the Sean bot wasn’t receptive to any naysaying right about now.
“In about sixty seconds, things are going to get a little intense for you organics,” he said. “Strap in, everybody.”
The targeting system sounded an alert, and the AI-assist requested a handover. The aft viewport screen showed the Baeder closing on us quickly.
“They’re on us!” I said. “Range is—”
“Executing J-turn!” the Sean bot interrupted me. “Hang on!”
I locked my harness just as the ship abruptly spun—a full 180 degrees rotation according to the gyro display. Then everything shook as the thrusters fired in a braking maneuver that turned my stomach inside-out. The lights flickered, screens went dark, and we lost gravity for a few seconds as the compensators struggled against overload.
“You’ll have less than ten seconds to take two shots, JJ. Take a deep breath and make both of them count, son.”
“Two seconds? Starting when?”
The bow screen came back to life, with my targeting computer overlaying a barrage of real-time data and reticiles on the video feed. The screen showed the hangar tunnel zooming past as we hurtled backwards through it.
“Fire at will!”
I didn’t do anything dumb like close my eyes, but I did feel myself relax and almost melt into my gunner’s seat.
Then it was like time slowed down.
When I saw the massive beams and struts appear, I tracked them with my HUD and then fired. One, then two.
It was all over in less than a second.
But then the video feed burned hot white.
Boom!
“Torps away!” I tried to say, but my voice was drowned out by the cacophony of engine roar, thruster fire, and z-field generators cycling up.
The display came back to reveal that we were now inside the hangar itself, a cavernous space that could easily fit twenty Vostoks end-to-end.
Thank Dynark we were stopping. I had a vision of us punching through the other side of the hangar—or more likely exploding against it. But the thrusters arrested our motion and the Sean bot deftly spun the ship around and eased it into a docking berth.
